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VRBO/HomeAway Announcement
Dear Spence,
It’s Dave and Lynn, the VRBO Webmasters, here with some exciting news which we wanted you to hear first from us. After seven months of coordinated effort, and in conjunction with funding representing the largest financing of an Internet software and services company in the U.S. this year, VRBO.COM is now officially part of HomeAway, Inc.
HomeAway runs several of the most respected vacation rental listing sites on the Internet, including http://www.HomeAway.com which has about as many listings as VRBO. With the addition of VRBO, HomeAway sites now total more than 130,000 vacation homes worldwide. More importantly, the combined sites also reach more than 50 million travelers - and these numbers are growing rapidly each month.
You might ask, "Why did Dave and Lynn decide to sell VRBO now?" Obviously we wanted to make sure it was the best thing to do for VRBO and it’s members before we took this step.
First a Little History - VRBO started as a family business with a single listing of our Breckenridge, Colorado condo in 1995. Wow, have things changed! Today, VRBO advertises nearly 65,000 vacation properties all over the world and is used by more than 25 million travelers each year. VRBO’s success is tied directly to the enthusiasm of its members (more than 50% of new listings come as a result of referrals by existing VRBO members). To support this growth, we now employ a dedicated staff of nearly 40 people.
The Industry is Changing - Our mission is to provide our members with as many rental inquiries and bookings as possible. As the number of vacation properties continues to grow (more than one million U.S. vacation homes were purchased in the last 12 months alone), there is a distinct need to attract a larger audience of renters, both in the U.S. and overseas. Larger investments in marketing and technology will be required to attract and serve the mass market of leisure travelers, the majority of whom still think that staying in a hotel is the only way to vacation. The leisure travel business is also global, with millions of potential renters for your property living in other parts of the world. There is a much bigger audience out there waiting to rent your property, and we want to make sure you have access to those people.
Why HomeAway?– Over the years, we’ve been approached by many organizations interested in purchasing or merging with VRBO. In our hearts, we know that we have grown VRBO about as far as our abilities can stretch. We felt a huge responsibility to choose someone with vision and passion for the "by owner" market, someone capable of taking VRBO to the next level.
HomeAway is headed by Brian Sharples, whose industry experience includes ten years at IntelliQuest Information Group, where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer. We’ve known Brian for more than two years now, and frankly, we trust him and his commitment to the vacation rental market place. He is supported by an excellent management team including "rent by owner" advocate Christine Karpinski. Christine is well known to many of our members, as the author of the book "How to Rent Vacation Properties by Owner and Profit from Your Vacation Home Dream".
In less than two years, HomeAway has built an online market that rivals VRBO in terms of both listings and consumer traffic. They’ve taken a slightly different approach than VRBO in terms of the "look and feel" of their various Web sites and in their geographic coverage – having almost as many employees in Europe as the U.S. The result is not that HomeAway.com is better than VRBO or vice versa, but just that these differences attract different groups of travelers and together they represent the largest audience of vacation rental travelers in the world.
Since February 2005, Brian and HomeAway have been partners with VRBO in the popular http://www.rentors.org website (Rentors supplies free vacation rental calendars and guest comment services to the vacation rental industry). We’ve been able to work face-to-face with Brian and observe his integrity. As a result, we have chosen Brian to be the one to take VRBO to the next level.
What Does This Mean to VRBO Members? – Don’t expect any sweeping changes to VRBO. VRBO is a super-successful site and HomeAway wants to keep it the way it is, although we would like to make it easier to manage a listing on both VRBO and other HomeAway sites in the coming months. The same employees who have run VRBO for years will continue to operate the site, so please continue to contact VRBO customer service at webmaster@vrbo.com with any support issues. Dave and Lynn aren’t going away either; in fact we believe in HomeAway so much that we are now one of its largest individual shareholders.
If you are looking for additional exposure for your vacation property now, check out http://www.HomeAway.com where you can join four of the top U.S. vacation rental advertising sites for just $299 per year (and only ONE application to fill out!). Having both HomeAway and VRBO subscriptions is a powerful inquiry and booking generator, especially as you get ready for the huge January rental booking season. We’ve been happily advertising our Maui condo on the HomeAway Network since it launched earlier this year. The word from VRBO members is that HomeAway listings provide top value and excellent results.
For more information on HomeAway and the acquisition of VRBO, a copy of the press release with details is available at: http://www.homeaway.com/index.cfm/tg...release_111306
You Need a Vacation Too! – VRBO recently announced it’s partnership with iTravex, the "Points Based" Vacation Rental Exchange and HomeAway will continue that partnership. iTravex is now 100% active and members are reserving travel right now. Paris?, Hawaii?, Tahoe?, Florida? Colorado?, where do YOU want to go? Check out all the properties at http://www.iTravex.com – if you haven’t already done so, opt-in to iTravex by going to https://admin.vrbo.com/admin .
As a final thought, Lynn thought it would be fun to write up the history of VRBO, which we are including at the end of this message.
Please feel free to respond to this email if you have any questions or comments.
As always, Happy Rentals!
Dave and Lynn
VRBO.COM founders
--------------------------------------------------------
VRBO - The Early Years
Dave and I were college sweethearts. We met at Point Loma College (a small Christian College) in San Diego, California, and we both graduated in 1979. We were married in 1980 and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during our early married years.
Looking back, I guess you could say that our VRBO story really begins with two unexpected events in our lives. Those events certainly felt like negatives when they occurred, but we truly believe Romans 8:28 which says "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." and looking back, we can definitely see God’s leading in our lives, even when it didn’t make sense to us at the time...
Event #1 – While visiting my parents during spring break in 1979, I was injured in an automobile accident.
Event #2 – Eight years later, in 1987, the technology company Dave was working for lost a major contract. In a round of cutbacks that eventually shut down the company, Dave found himself without a job.
Amazingly enough, those two happenings started off a chain of events that ultimately led to the formation of "Vacation Rentals by Owner" - VRBO.COM.
The insurance settlement that resulted from my auto accident was used as a down payment on a $44,000 fixer upper home in Richmond, California. After repairing and moving into that home, we rented our original home to long term tenants and we became landlords for the very first time.
Dave's subsequent employment search in 1987 led him to take a job with United Airlines in Colorado. So, Dave and I with our two young sons, packed up and moved our family to Aurora, Colorado. (Our sons, Matthew and Michael, are now college age, and in our "unbiased opinion" they are two of the finest young men you could ever hope to meet!)
After relocating our family to Colorado, we sold - our rental home in California and reinvested the funds in a ski condo in Breckenridge, Colorado. Our desire was to rent our condo to skiers as a short-term vacation rental so we could use it ourselves every once in while! <grin>
So, we owned a ski condo (when I say "we" – what I really mean is "us and the mortgage company"!)… but we knew we wouldn’t be able to afford to make the payments if we didn't figure out a way to keep the condo rented during Colorado’s short four month ski season each year.
Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, so we signed up for our very own 800 number, we got a merchant account to accept credit cards from our renters, and we began advertising by placing a small 15 word ad with no pictures in the back of one of the major ski magazines. That's how we used to do "vacation rentals by owner" back in the good ‘ole days. (BTW - 5 months of this advertising in the early 90's cost us more than 4 times the base price of a ONE YEAR ad on VRBO today).
I still remember Dave wishing we had a more cost effective way to advertise our ski condo than to posting a small and expensive classified ad. In the fall of 1995, our Breckenridge ski condo became listing #1 in Dave's first attempt at building a web site as a way to reach potential renters, and VRBO was born.
Dave continued to build web pages for other property owners for "free" over the next year. He would come home from his full time programming job and disappear into the basement to work for hours on end on his newbie website. It wasn't until he began adding photos to the listings that we started charging members to be included. Then Dave had to teach me to help him with answering email, updating and publishing ads, posting photos, and we worked together to create our initial payment system too. I remember hoping that someday we could get to the point where we would be adding a new listing each day… Wow, wouldn’t that be awesome <smile>! In October of 2006, VRBO averaged over 90 new listings per day!
For a few years, it was just Dave and I, working together out of a room in our basement that kept the site running. But as VRBO continued to grow, we found that we couldn't keep up with everything and do–it-all ourselves anymore. So we started asking friends if they would like to have a high tech job working with us in our basement!?!<grin> When Dave finally figured out how to make the database available over the Internet, we did get our basement room back and our staff members were able to begin working from their own homes. It was a win-win situation all around. We do have an office in St Thomas, but all of our stateside VRBO staff members still work from their own homes.
Probably the scariest decision we had to make in VRBO’s early days was deciding when we could quit our "real" jobs and take a leap of faith… believing that this little Internet business Dave dreamed up would bring in enough income to take care of our family. I have to confess though that when quitting time came first for me, I didn’t mind hanging up my part-time RN badge and saying good-bye to working nightshifts at the hospital. Dave continued his full time job with benefits probably longer than he needed to, but when our VRBO income continued to exceed his programming income, we knew it was time for him to go full time with VRBO as well.
So that’s our basic VRBO story. We’ve had a great run. We’ve had plenty of laughs over the years and some tears sprinkled in along the way too. It’s been quite a grand adventure watching our VRBO baby grow to what it has become today. We have certainly been very blessed and we know that HomeAway is going to take good care of VRBO from here on.
God bless you all,
Dave and Lynn Clouse - VRBO founders
VRBO is Vacation Rentals by Owner http:/www.vrbo.com
"VRBO", "Vacation Rentals by Owner", & "Carpe Vacationum-'Seize the Vacation'" Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off
It’s Dave and Lynn, the VRBO Webmasters, here with some exciting news which we wanted you to hear first from us. After seven months of coordinated effort, and in conjunction with funding representing the largest financing of an Internet software and services company in the U.S. this year, VRBO.COM is now officially part of HomeAway, Inc.
HomeAway runs several of the most respected vacation rental listing sites on the Internet, including http://www.HomeAway.com which has about as many listings as VRBO. With the addition of VRBO, HomeAway sites now total more than 130,000 vacation homes worldwide. More importantly, the combined sites also reach more than 50 million travelers - and these numbers are growing rapidly each month.
You might ask, "Why did Dave and Lynn decide to sell VRBO now?" Obviously we wanted to make sure it was the best thing to do for VRBO and it’s members before we took this step.
First a Little History - VRBO started as a family business with a single listing of our Breckenridge, Colorado condo in 1995. Wow, have things changed! Today, VRBO advertises nearly 65,000 vacation properties all over the world and is used by more than 25 million travelers each year. VRBO’s success is tied directly to the enthusiasm of its members (more than 50% of new listings come as a result of referrals by existing VRBO members). To support this growth, we now employ a dedicated staff of nearly 40 people.
The Industry is Changing - Our mission is to provide our members with as many rental inquiries and bookings as possible. As the number of vacation properties continues to grow (more than one million U.S. vacation homes were purchased in the last 12 months alone), there is a distinct need to attract a larger audience of renters, both in the U.S. and overseas. Larger investments in marketing and technology will be required to attract and serve the mass market of leisure travelers, the majority of whom still think that staying in a hotel is the only way to vacation. The leisure travel business is also global, with millions of potential renters for your property living in other parts of the world. There is a much bigger audience out there waiting to rent your property, and we want to make sure you have access to those people.
Why HomeAway?– Over the years, we’ve been approached by many organizations interested in purchasing or merging with VRBO. In our hearts, we know that we have grown VRBO about as far as our abilities can stretch. We felt a huge responsibility to choose someone with vision and passion for the "by owner" market, someone capable of taking VRBO to the next level.
HomeAway is headed by Brian Sharples, whose industry experience includes ten years at IntelliQuest Information Group, where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer. We’ve known Brian for more than two years now, and frankly, we trust him and his commitment to the vacation rental market place. He is supported by an excellent management team including "rent by owner" advocate Christine Karpinski. Christine is well known to many of our members, as the author of the book "How to Rent Vacation Properties by Owner and Profit from Your Vacation Home Dream".
In less than two years, HomeAway has built an online market that rivals VRBO in terms of both listings and consumer traffic. They’ve taken a slightly different approach than VRBO in terms of the "look and feel" of their various Web sites and in their geographic coverage – having almost as many employees in Europe as the U.S. The result is not that HomeAway.com is better than VRBO or vice versa, but just that these differences attract different groups of travelers and together they represent the largest audience of vacation rental travelers in the world.
Since February 2005, Brian and HomeAway have been partners with VRBO in the popular http://www.rentors.org website (Rentors supplies free vacation rental calendars and guest comment services to the vacation rental industry). We’ve been able to work face-to-face with Brian and observe his integrity. As a result, we have chosen Brian to be the one to take VRBO to the next level.
What Does This Mean to VRBO Members? – Don’t expect any sweeping changes to VRBO. VRBO is a super-successful site and HomeAway wants to keep it the way it is, although we would like to make it easier to manage a listing on both VRBO and other HomeAway sites in the coming months. The same employees who have run VRBO for years will continue to operate the site, so please continue to contact VRBO customer service at webmaster@vrbo.com with any support issues. Dave and Lynn aren’t going away either; in fact we believe in HomeAway so much that we are now one of its largest individual shareholders.
If you are looking for additional exposure for your vacation property now, check out http://www.HomeAway.com where you can join four of the top U.S. vacation rental advertising sites for just $299 per year (and only ONE application to fill out!). Having both HomeAway and VRBO subscriptions is a powerful inquiry and booking generator, especially as you get ready for the huge January rental booking season. We’ve been happily advertising our Maui condo on the HomeAway Network since it launched earlier this year. The word from VRBO members is that HomeAway listings provide top value and excellent results.
For more information on HomeAway and the acquisition of VRBO, a copy of the press release with details is available at: http://www.homeaway.com/index.cfm/tg...release_111306
You Need a Vacation Too! – VRBO recently announced it’s partnership with iTravex, the "Points Based" Vacation Rental Exchange and HomeAway will continue that partnership. iTravex is now 100% active and members are reserving travel right now. Paris?, Hawaii?, Tahoe?, Florida? Colorado?, where do YOU want to go? Check out all the properties at http://www.iTravex.com – if you haven’t already done so, opt-in to iTravex by going to https://admin.vrbo.com/admin .
As a final thought, Lynn thought it would be fun to write up the history of VRBO, which we are including at the end of this message.
Please feel free to respond to this email if you have any questions or comments.
As always, Happy Rentals!
Dave and Lynn
VRBO.COM founders
--------------------------------------------------------
VRBO - The Early Years
Dave and I were college sweethearts. We met at Point Loma College (a small Christian College) in San Diego, California, and we both graduated in 1979. We were married in 1980 and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during our early married years.
Looking back, I guess you could say that our VRBO story really begins with two unexpected events in our lives. Those events certainly felt like negatives when they occurred, but we truly believe Romans 8:28 which says "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." and looking back, we can definitely see God’s leading in our lives, even when it didn’t make sense to us at the time...
Event #1 – While visiting my parents during spring break in 1979, I was injured in an automobile accident.
Event #2 – Eight years later, in 1987, the technology company Dave was working for lost a major contract. In a round of cutbacks that eventually shut down the company, Dave found himself without a job.
Amazingly enough, those two happenings started off a chain of events that ultimately led to the formation of "Vacation Rentals by Owner" - VRBO.COM.
The insurance settlement that resulted from my auto accident was used as a down payment on a $44,000 fixer upper home in Richmond, California. After repairing and moving into that home, we rented our original home to long term tenants and we became landlords for the very first time.
Dave's subsequent employment search in 1987 led him to take a job with United Airlines in Colorado. So, Dave and I with our two young sons, packed up and moved our family to Aurora, Colorado. (Our sons, Matthew and Michael, are now college age, and in our "unbiased opinion" they are two of the finest young men you could ever hope to meet!)
After relocating our family to Colorado, we sold - our rental home in California and reinvested the funds in a ski condo in Breckenridge, Colorado. Our desire was to rent our condo to skiers as a short-term vacation rental so we could use it ourselves every once in while! <grin>
So, we owned a ski condo (when I say "we" – what I really mean is "us and the mortgage company"!)… but we knew we wouldn’t be able to afford to make the payments if we didn't figure out a way to keep the condo rented during Colorado’s short four month ski season each year.
Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, so we signed up for our very own 800 number, we got a merchant account to accept credit cards from our renters, and we began advertising by placing a small 15 word ad with no pictures in the back of one of the major ski magazines. That's how we used to do "vacation rentals by owner" back in the good ‘ole days. (BTW - 5 months of this advertising in the early 90's cost us more than 4 times the base price of a ONE YEAR ad on VRBO today).
I still remember Dave wishing we had a more cost effective way to advertise our ski condo than to posting a small and expensive classified ad. In the fall of 1995, our Breckenridge ski condo became listing #1 in Dave's first attempt at building a web site as a way to reach potential renters, and VRBO was born.
Dave continued to build web pages for other property owners for "free" over the next year. He would come home from his full time programming job and disappear into the basement to work for hours on end on his newbie website. It wasn't until he began adding photos to the listings that we started charging members to be included. Then Dave had to teach me to help him with answering email, updating and publishing ads, posting photos, and we worked together to create our initial payment system too. I remember hoping that someday we could get to the point where we would be adding a new listing each day… Wow, wouldn’t that be awesome <smile>! In October of 2006, VRBO averaged over 90 new listings per day!
For a few years, it was just Dave and I, working together out of a room in our basement that kept the site running. But as VRBO continued to grow, we found that we couldn't keep up with everything and do–it-all ourselves anymore. So we started asking friends if they would like to have a high tech job working with us in our basement!?!<grin> When Dave finally figured out how to make the database available over the Internet, we did get our basement room back and our staff members were able to begin working from their own homes. It was a win-win situation all around. We do have an office in St Thomas, but all of our stateside VRBO staff members still work from their own homes.
Probably the scariest decision we had to make in VRBO’s early days was deciding when we could quit our "real" jobs and take a leap of faith… believing that this little Internet business Dave dreamed up would bring in enough income to take care of our family. I have to confess though that when quitting time came first for me, I didn’t mind hanging up my part-time RN badge and saying good-bye to working nightshifts at the hospital. Dave continued his full time job with benefits probably longer than he needed to, but when our VRBO income continued to exceed his programming income, we knew it was time for him to go full time with VRBO as well.
So that’s our basic VRBO story. We’ve had a great run. We’ve had plenty of laughs over the years and some tears sprinkled in along the way too. It’s been quite a grand adventure watching our VRBO baby grow to what it has become today. We have certainly been very blessed and we know that HomeAway is going to take good care of VRBO from here on.
God bless you all,
Dave and Lynn Clouse - VRBO founders
VRBO is Vacation Rentals by Owner http:/www.vrbo.com
"VRBO", "Vacation Rentals by Owner", & "Carpe Vacationum-'Seize the Vacation'" Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off
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