Guestready: the Hostmaker alternative
The Airbnb property management market is constantly evolving; as more companies are launched to help Airbnb hosts manage their accommodation, the competitive landscape never stops to change.
Competition is fierce, and leadership is a status that is temporary by design and has to be won over and over with no end in sight. Hostmaker recently became the newest name to be added on the casualty list. Once considered as one of the leaders of the Airbnb management industry, it declared bankruptcy in early March 2020.
Hostmaker was a leading Airbnb management company
Hostmaker was a property management company created in 2014 by Nakul Sharma, who used to work as a strategy manager at InterContinental Hotels Group. Over the years, the company raised £23m in two fundraising rounds, allowing it to expand its business from London to Thailand, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.
What happened to one of the renown property management companies?
It recently was revealed that a significant crisis had been looming on the company: despite having raised £23m since its launch six years prior, Hostmaker had been facing a major cash crunch. In 2018, Flying Jamon – Hostmaker’s parent company – spent £9.9 million to generate a turnover of £12 million, but at the same time accrued £16 million of administrative expenses, resulting in a net loss of £14.3 million.
To cover the mounting losses, the company scrambled for several months to find new investors and get back on the growth path. Despite their efforts, the vital funds did not appear. End of February 2020, the UK newspaper The Times broke the news, claiming that “the parent company (Flying Jamon Limited) has filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators at the High Court, giving it 10 days to resolve issues with creditors”. A few days later, it was officially announced that Flying Jamon Ltd had been placed in into administration and ceased trading.
During its several years of operations, Hostmaker built an important portfolio of hosts who, now, have to find an alternative provider to continue letting their apartment on Airbnb and other booking platforms. If you’re reading these lines, you might even be an ex-Hostmaker host yourself, wondering what to do next.
When used to partnering up with a property management company, managing your place on your own can be difficult to consider. Indeed, being a host, especially if you are new to it, can be very time-consuming. GuestReady can help you get back on track.
Why should you consider GuestReady as the alternative to Hostmaker?
GuestReady is an award-winning property management company launched in 2016, which provides professional services to property investors, homeowners and Airbnb hosts in the UK (London, Edinburgh, Manchester), France (Paris, Cannes), Portugal (Lisbon, Porto), Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong.
We continuously grow our local teams in order to best serve hosts and guests, always going the extra mile to ensure we keep everyone satisfied and happy to the best of our abilities. The fact that more than 60% of our hosts have become Superhosts since partnering up with GuestReady is a testimony of this dedication.
But don’t just take our word for it: we encourage you to discover the reviews left by hosts and guests on TrustPilot about us (we currently enjoy a rating of 4.7/5 across more than 480 reviews) but also about the other short-term rental property managers, and be your own judge.
Combining first in class technology and hospitality excellence, GuestReady guarantees the best stays for your guests. Quality is at the core of all we do, and you can discover more about our services here.
We keep the relationship between guests and GuestReady as transparent and fluid as possible, making sure all their queries can be promptly answered without your involvement.
For this purpose, our guest relations team is online and available for them 24/7. Can’t turn on the air conditioning? Struggling to close a door? Cannot figure out how to use the TV? Do not worry; they won’t need to contact you. You can count on our team’s reactivity to solve any issue they might encounter.
From a technological point of view, GuestReady has built its own state of the art software that allows local teams to manage properties most efficiently; our technology is actually so established that even other property managers use it.
As a GuestReady host, you will have access to your own host dashboard, where you can see and manage all things property-related.
To explore how we could work together, please feel free to contact us. We would love to hear from you, even just for a simple chat!
