How we built a market-leading Airbnb management company & software to power it’s growth

How it all began

Just like many Airbnb managers, we started our journey as Airbnb hosts of our own properties in Sydney, Australia. We loved hosting guests and creating great travel experiences but soon realised just how much work is involved in hosting on Airbnb.

Back in 2015, Airbnb was growing remarkably. However, the industry lacked specialised rental managers that understood the intricacies of the short-term rental market and could deliver a top-quality specialised service.

We realised that it was a great time to start a specialised Airbnb management business. So we quit our corporate jobs and started Hometime.

Solving for growth and technology challenges

Our strong focus on guest reviews and quality service delivery started attracting new homeowners and soon we found ourselves managing a large property portfolio. This brought a lot of operational complexity and we realised that we needed a good software package to continue growing our business.

We tested and used many different solutions available in the market. However,this led us to constantly make tradeoffs between functionality and usability. We wanted to get our time back with the help of software but we ended up constantly managing multiple different solutions and dealing with even more complexity than we had before.

The birth of the Hometime Platform

The constant challenges with software providers in the short-term rental industry led us to build our own software. We started with a handful of functionalities and over the last couple of years expanded to a full suite of solutions that’s now powering hundreds of properties in our portfolio in Australia and New Zealand.

Over time, we have also started receiving requests from other fellow operators asking if they could licence our software for their own portfolios. This has encouraged us to open our platform to the public earlier this year.

We are glad to have received very strong interest and positive feedback from fellow operators all across the globe. This has encouraged us to build a dedicated team to help onboarding and support our global software user base.

What’s next?

As we continue to build our platform and remain close to every fellow property manager using it, we realise how valuable each of our learnings about short-term rental management, channel distribution, marketing and customer acquisition are to the Airbnb community Regardless of where we are in the world, we all face similar challenges and can certainly benefit from standardized solutions.

We thus aim to expand and build our platform to be a robust operating and growth engine for the whole short-term rental industry - like Shopify in the ecommerce space. We have an exciting pipeline of very unique features and services to bring to you over the coming months.

If you have not yet tested the Hometime Platform but are keen to give it a go, feel free to book a demo with one of our specialists at www.hometimeapp.io/contact-us.