Skift Take
Can short-term rental companies avoid growing pains by staying local?
There is a lesson to be learned from struggling short-term rental companies: Bigger isn’t always better.
As Charleston, South Carolina-based property management company Portoro enters Virginia and Oregon with two acquisitions, it is making sure to take it slow and steady. The two-year-old company manages 275 homes, most of which it got through acquisitions of regional property managers.
Several companies, including Vacasa, follow a similar strategy. However, Portoro CEO Dustin Abney believes the difference lies in how companies execute that strategy: The cost of acquisitions and the integration of the units.
“The reason that Portoro is different from, say Vacasa, is that it was using venture capital dollars to acquire their way through unit count,” Abney said. “They were trying to buy up their growth as fast as possible. And in one sense, they were paying over market value as they w