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Fairly co-founders, from left: Subechya Person, Eric Breon, and Jeff Flitton. (Fairly Photo)
The founder and former CEO of Vacasa is leading a new, Portland, Ore.-based vacation rental platform called Fairly, which emerged from stealth mode Tuesday with $10.1 million in pre-seed funding.
CEO Eric Breon is joined by Fairly co-founders Subechya Person, chief product officer, and Jeff Flitton, chief technology officer. Both are also veterans of Vacasa.
Breon spent more than 10 years at Vacasa, which also launched in Portland in 2009. Vacasa grew to become a leader among full-service vacation rental management companies, with more than 6,000 employees and 25,000 homes under management across 16 countries. The company went public via a SPAC deal in 2021.
Breon is taking lessons learned from his Vacasa journey to launch a competing service that gives vacation rental owners individualized care and automation tools.
Each Fairly homeowner is supported by a two-person team of their choosing, including caretakers who are responsible for the day-to-day operations on behalf of the owner, from guest communications to cleaning and maintenance, and advisors, typically real estate agents, who can leverage their market knowledge and expertise to help homeowners navigate local permit and registration requirements and find local specialists as needed.
“With typical vacation rental managers, homeowners are assigned to a manager, and cleans are assigned to a contractor,” Breon told GeekWire via email. “It’s very impersonal, and there isn’t much (if any) connection between the homeowner and the cleaners that actually care for the home.”
Breon said Fairly owners can communicate directly with their caretaker to improve their property rather than going through layers of management. The caretakers on Fairly’s platform set the fee at which they’re willing to clean a given home and they choose which owners they want to work with. Caretakers are invested in the success of the home, Breon said, because they get 100% of the cleaning fee.
“And they are the primary point of contact for guest questions as they’ll know the home better than anyone — which is a far better experience for guests than the off-shore call center experience that seems to have become the standard for vacation rental managers,” he said.
Fairly takes 20% of the rental fee and shares half with local partners — 5% to the advisor and 5% to the caretaker.
Fairly will be borrowing some of what Breon and others created at Vacasa, such as modern yield management that he brought to vacation rentals as well as a focus on partnering with third party channels like Vrbo and Airbnb. Vacasa was also early with features like electronic access control.
Those features are now common to most large managers, and they’re part of the Fairly platform as well, in addition to automation of such processes as finances, tax remittance, and AI-powered dynamic pricing.
“The unique aspects of the Fairly platform are largely focused on empowering homeowners and caretakers,” Breon said. “Is their home purely an investment, from which they want to extract the maximum potential revenue? We make that easy. Is their home a treasured family sanctuary, for which they’d prefer to maintain higher prices to minimize wear and tear while maintaining availability for personal use? We make that easy, too.”
And while caretakers are the primary point of contact for guest questions, owners have visibility into all communications, and can join the conversion if they like. This helps homeowners who enjoy being involved in hosting but don’t want to be responsible for everything.
Fairly employs 25 people, the majority of whom are software engineers.
The funding was secured internally from co-founders and employees.
