CEOs of Awaze Group and Evolve on What Consumers Want Now: Full Video

Executives in the short-term rental industry believe their customers possess a unique level of flexibility: Consumers may go low-budget hiking in Albania one week, then stay at a 5-star Italian getaway the next.

Awaze Group CEO Henrik Kjellberg and Evolve Co-founder and CEO Brian Egan spoke in detail about their customers to Skift Short-Term Rental Reporter Srivdya Kalyanaraman at the 2023 Short-Term Rental Summit.

In their discussion, Kjellberg and Egan explored the implications of catering to the ever-increasing demands of both their users and property owners. They emphasized the importance of focusing on specific markets and building a strong presence within those markets, rather than expanding into new geographical regions.

You can watch a full video of their discussion as well as read a transcript of it below.

Srividya Kalyanaraman: So, we have the largest suppliers in Europe and U.S. here. Awaze, we have over 110 properties in the portfolio and 30,000 properties. So it's very intentional to have both of you here on stage today to basically ask why don't we have you playing in each other's markets, or why don't we have anybody kind of crossing over and merging continents?

Brain Egan: I'm happy to take a swing at it, and then I'll let Henrik. So I would say, first of all, it's a difficult business, and when you talk about the domestic market, the U.S. domestic for us, it's a much less mature market than in Europe. So I think you're talking about a bit of apples and oranges in terms of the maturity of the relative markets and the types of companies; I mean, you have a brand that's 75 years old or something within your portfolio, whereas everybody playing at scale in the U.S. has been built roughly in the last ten years. So I think that's one thing. The other would be, and this is just from my perspective, really interested to hear what Henrik has to say, is for us, the U.S. is the largest greenfield opportunity in the world right now. 

There are nine million vacation properties there are. There's about two million; two and a half (people debate the number) that are rented out on a short-term basis every year, and the two or three, or four largest players in the whole space, included, have less than a hundred thousand of those properties under management. So, we see this as a very early-stage game right now, and we think there's a lot of room