HomeAway M&A Infographic
In 2004, the National Association of Realtors reported that Americans bought a record number of vacation properties. A year later, WVR Group acquired five leading vacation rental websites and began a lightning-fast ascent to the top of multi-billion dollar market.
During what might be considered a flagship acquisition year, the company scooped up Web businesses that immediately set it apart from the competition. Take, for example, cyberrentals.com. Founded by Vermonters Hunter Melville and Dave Bollinger in 1995, the site had operated online for about ten years prior to the acquisition. It was well covered by national newspapers like The New York Times and had over 16,000 listings with most properties located in the Northeast, a region accounting for almost 30% of all vacation homes in the United States.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, WVR Group acquired Holiday-rentals.com, the largest rentals marketplace in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1995/96, it had 19,400 listings and owned an award-winning website system dubbed “TRIPS.” Combined with FeWo-direkt.de, the most-visited German language site, which had licensed the “TRIPS” system from Holiday-rentals.com, both sites created the largest rentals directory in Europe.
With a few other U.S.-based acquisitions completed in 2005, WVR Group instantly became the leading online marketplace for vacation rentals in the U.S. and U.K. Later renamed HomeAway Inc., it continued an M&A blitzkrieg by targeting businesses with long operating history, established search engine positions, and significant numbers of listings.
Today, HomeAway Inc. has over 500,000 paid listings across 100 countries. It operates well-known online brands, and it is almost a guarantee that you will come across five to seven of them in the top ten Google search results. In many cases, you might see HomeAway’s websites occupying the top three search results; which, according to some research reports, attract over 60% of all clicks, while about 90% of all clicks come from the first ten search results.
Clearly, HomeAway’s rapid acquisition strategy has paid off well. Since its inception, HomeAway Inc. has acquired 15 businesses en route to the top of the vacation rentals market and has never made it a secret that acquisitions have driven its tremendous growth. “If there’s any secret, it’s that there were already several regional Internet companies with a similar passion and determination, and we were fortunate enough to recognize this. We were in the right place at the right time to acquire the best of them, and we built on their success,” said Brian Sharples, a co-founder of HomeAway, in an interview with the Austin Business Journal in June 2012.
Indeed, HomeAway Inc. began operating in the right place and at the right time. The multi-billion dollar question, though, is how many of “the best of them” are still available there to keep the company growing at the lightning-fast pace.
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