Vacation rental company Vacasa doubles Portland office space, plans to hire 100 employees in 2018
March 14, 2018
This article was first published by Brinkwire.
Fresh off a $103 million investment round, vacation rental management company Vacasa is moving into a new 61,000 square-foot office in Portland, nearly doubling its current office space with plans to grow its 320-person workforce by another 100 employees this year.
Vacasa inked an 11-year lease for all four office floors of Heartline, a new mixed-use development in Portland’s Pearl District. There is room for up to 675 employees. Vacasa plans to move in this summer and will also keep its current 36,000 square-foot space on the top floor of the RiverTec building, located just across the street from Heartline, which is owned by Seattle-based Security Properties.
Vacasa bills itself as the “largest U.S. vacation rental management company” and offers various services — marketing, rate optimization, reservations, guest services, housekeeping, maintenance, etc. — to help homeowners earn money off their property. It has more than 8,000 vacation homes listed on its site across 20 U.S. states, Europe, South and Central America, and South Africa.
Vacasa landed one of the region’s largest fundraising rounds last year, reeling in $103 million this past October from Riverwood Capital, NewSpring and previous investors Level Equity and Assurant Growth Investing.
The company is similar to platforms like Airbnb, which is valued at $31 billion, and HomeAway, which was acquired by Expedia for $3.9 billion in 2015. In addition to people working out of offices in Portland and Boise, the company employs more than 1,000 across its markets for on-the-ground “field-based roles” — housekeepers, reservations agents, local managers, etc.
Vacasa has been around since 2009 and bootstrapped until taking its first outside investment in 2016 with a $40 million Series A round.