Moving beyond Airbnb to hotel-quality home rentals

Just ten years after it was found­ed in 2008, Airbnb’s annu­al rev­enues broke the $2‑billion mark. The explo­sive growth of the home-shar­ing mar­ket has made short-term rentals seem com­mon­place, yet the sec­tor is still in its infan­cy. PwC pre­dicts that by 2025 the home accom­mo­da­tion indus­try will be worth $330 bil­lion in Europe alone, five times its cur­rent size.

How­ev­er, this growth will only be achieved if the indus­try can over­come “Airbnb anx­i­ety”, the ques­tions guests ask them­selves when book­ing: “Will the home be clean? Will it be safe? Will it even be there?”

Mer­ilee Karr, chief exec­u­tive and founder of Under­The­Do­or­mat, a Lon­don-based lux­u­ry short-term rental com­pa­ny, sees this as the next big chal­lenge for the indus­try to crack.

“The hol­i­day homes indus­try has been around for many years, but the emer­gence of short-term rentals in cities is a new phe­nom­e­non. Many hosts are still learn­ing how to do things prop­er­ly. It’s very rare to have a seri­ous neg­a­tive issue, but the pub­lic­i­ty they receive can under­mine a mar­ket with a lot of poten­tial growth,” she says.

Ms Karr, who chairs UKSTAA (UK Short-Term Accom­mo­da­tion Asso­ci­a­tion) and has led the cre­ation of the world’s first accred­i­ta­tion scheme for the indus­try, is a believ­er in prac­tis­ing what UKSTAA is preach­ing.

Under­The­Do­or­mat was cre­at­ed five years ago with the vision of pro­vid­ing the qual­i­ty of a hotel in the com­fort of homes. This meant ver­i­fy­ing every­thing from the qual­i­ty stan­dards of each home, to clean­li­ness, health and safe­ty, and accu­rate online list­ings.

“It’s striv­ing for con­sis­ten­cy all round. It’s not just cus­tomers want­i­ng a qual­i­ty stay, but it’s home­own­ers want­i­ng to know cus­tomers have been suit­ably vet­ted too,” says Ms Karr.

“Where we are suc­ceed­ing is by being the inter­sec­tion of prop­er­ty ser­vice and tech; hav­ing a SaaS [soft­ware-as-a-ser­vice] plat­form, but with a ser­vice lay­er around it that ensures qual­i­ty in a sec­tor that hasn’t always reached those expec­ta­tions.”

Alter­na­tive to peer-to-peer

The idea for Under­The­Do­or­mat came from Ms Karr’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence, hav­ing organ­ised many hol­i­days and trips, but often find­ing it dif­fi­cult to find suit­able lux­u­ry accom­mo­da­tion, a qual­i­ty home from home.

“The peo­ple with the nicest homes need assur­ance and they are often sec­ond-home own­ers or retirees, fre­quent busi­ness trav­ellers or fam­i­lies with inter­na­tion­al roots, but they will only con­sid­er rent­ing them out if there is a way to do it prop­er­ly. They want the assur­ance and capa­bil­i­ty of a pro­fes­sion­al com­pa­ny to ful­ly man­age their home for them,” she says.

Five years on and now one of the first com­pa­nies in Lon­don to work with Homes & Vil­las by Mar­riott Inter­na­tion­al, Under­The­Do­or­mat is enjoy­ing a snow­ball effect of uptake on both the home­own­er and guest sides, which not only val­i­dates Ms Karr’s analy­sis of the sec­tor, but reflects the con­tin­u­ing growth in short-term rentals in the UK.

“Despite the vis­i­bil­i­ty the sec­tor has already achieved, the big wave of growth is yet to come,” she says. “High-end home­own­ers and cor­po­rate prop­er­ty com­pa­nies are just start­ing to realise the poten­tial for short-term rentals with com­pa­nies like Under­The­Do­or­mat pro­vid­ing the assur­ance and brand qual­i­ty they need.

“They can earn effort­less income, know­ing a respon­si­ble, accred­it­ed com­pa­ny is look­ing after their most impor­tant asset when it would oth­er­wise be emp­ty.”

Scal­ing qual­i­ty for prop­er­ty man­agers

Under­The­Do­or­mat is a lead­ing provider in this sec­tor in Lon­don, and now beyond, as it offers its tech­nol­o­gy and routes to mar­ket to small­er high-end prop­er­ty man­age­ment com­pa­nies across the UK.

“With­in the next cou­ple of years, we’ll oper­ate more than 1,000 homes in Lon­don and at the same time we’re going to grow geo­graph­i­cal­ly by offer­ing part­ner com­pa­nies across the UK and Europe the abil­i­ty to dis­trib­ute via our tech­nol­o­gy,” says Ms Karr.

“We already have our first part­ner com­pa­nies in Lon­don, the Cotswolds and Lux­em­bourg, which is only the begin­ning. For those who have found the whole proptech propo­si­tion scary or too time con­sum­ing in the past, there is now an insured, lux­u­ry, man­aged propo­si­tion out there for them to enter the space.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please vis­it www.underthedoormat.com