WanderJaunt: Explained
“So, you’re kind of like Airbnb, right… ?”
“Well, sort of… but not quite.”
This exchange has come up in the majority of introductory conversations I’ve had about our business over the last 5 years — whether discussing WanderJaunt with a prospective candidate, vendor, investor, or friend. So like any good start-up team, we set out to solve the problem at hand: explaining our business.
Selection and Consistency
It all starts with a mission statement, and while ours has evolved slightly over the years, the core remains true:
WanderJaunt’s mission is to create a world where every kind of guest: short-term, long-term, traveler, local, work, play, etc., can expect a high-quality, consistent experience.
In order to attract such a broad audience, we need to provide what they want most: the broadest selection of properties. Unlike our competitors who built a modern take on hoteling by centralizing their operations out of large apartment complexes, WanderJaunt operates every format of residential real estate asset. This includes single family homes, condos, townhouses, and apartments that are distributed across a city in what we have come to describe as a decentralized supply network.
As selection increases however, so does complexity — and complexity is the enemy of consistency. Therefore selection alone is not sufficient, we need to provide the broadest selection while ensuring a consistent end user experience. Interestingly, these core tenets of selection and consistency in home sharing have largely gone unaddressed by every competitor in our space.
Solving for this complexity while promising a consistent experience demands an approach that is rooted in operations and scaled by leveraging technology and data. Where WanderJaunt is unique is that we have built the software, teams, and process to manage every element of the guest experience. From booking a stay through our online portal, to updating nightly rates every 20 minutes via our pricing algorithm, to automatically routing our housekeepers on the ground to their next destination — it’s all done in-house.
Beyond the software side of the business, we’ve created a set of streamlined operations organized by function: Property Services and Guest Services. Property Services is the engine that identifies prospective properties and converts them into guest-ready WanderJaunts through the coordinated efforts of our Sales, Interior Design, Procurement, Installation, and Content teams. The Guest Services organization is composed of our Housekeeping, Quality, and Customer Care teams who are oriented around providing and maintaining a high quality guest experience at every touchpoint.
Today, WanderJaunt manages 800+ properties distributed across 7markets. We’ve hosted more than 200,000 guests while maintaining over 90% guest satisfaction. Our business is primed for growth and we’re expanding into new markets across the country. So where do we go from here? Beyond building a national presence in the home sharing space, we see a large opportunity that WanderJaunt is uniquely positioned to capitalize on.
The Opportunity Ahead
Not only have we built a business to bring a decentralized supply network online, but we started by solving the most challenging, highest touch set of operations: delivering high quality, consistent stays to the short-term traveller. Mastering the demands of short-term travel unlocks the ability to move down the complexity curve to less operationally intensive offerings such as extended stays and long term rentals, leading to a larger opportunity in residential real estate.
Within the broader residential real estate space there are two ways to create value: (1) increasing yield and (2) asset appreciation. Yield management largely comes down to how a property is utilized. In general, long-term rentals where a tenant rents a property for 12 months or more is a low yield strategy that also minimizes operational burden and costs. This approach generates a predictable, steady cash flow but is one in which it is difficult to generate additional revenue. Short-term rentals, on the other hand, generate a high yield, but bring a high-touch, complex operation as I’ve alluded to. In order to maximize a property’s yield it is most effective to implement a dynamic approach to property management and toggle between these utilizations throughout the year based on factors like seasonality and events that drive the ability to optimize pricing for short-term stays.
Our dynamic approach to property management allows us to consistently generate above market yields which unlocks the second avenue for value creation in real estate: asset appreciation via acquisition. Unlike the competitors in our space who solely focus on centralizing supply in large apartment buildings, our decentralized supply network creates a direct channel to acquiring residential assets. This approach further accelerates our advantage in property management by controlling costs and opening the funnel to the largest possible selection of properties. The flywheel below illustrates our accumulating advantage: starting with short-term rentals opened the door to other forms of property management. This in turn opened the door to dynamic management, which unlocks above market yields, improves operational efficiency, and attracts capital to begin the process of asset acquisition — and the cycle repeats.
Today we are leveraging our advantage in maximizing yield to begin investing in real estate, which is transformational for our business. If you are interested in building the future of real estate management I invite you to explore our careers page or contact our team. We’re constantly looking for smart, driven teammates who are ready to build.
