Devin and staff, thus would be a great time for you guys to fill in with your version of a listing site for Vacation Rentals. Does this sound like something you can get into??? It is ripe for the picking. Be like what VRBO used to be. Just simply a listing site.
It is something we've thought about doing for sure because of what the big guys have done in the past few years but it is a very hard market to break into because of the saturation that the big guys have. We could certainly build the listing site, easily enough, but then you have to market and promote it and try to drive it to page 1 on Google for common searches. The big guys have saturated a lot of that space. Also, it then takes away from our focus on the back end management which we do really well and have a lot of passion for. So long story short, we'd like to but it's a big undertaking and not something to do on a whim. ~Sam
My feeling is that a Facebook, Google or Amazon should jump on this and just create a sophisticated classifieds setup with a simple subscription fee. They could do this in a heartbeat and if they don't get greedy, could immediately gain hundreds of thousands of customers. They'd have the reach and marketing dollars to promote it and have it be successful right from the get-go.