From Vacasa to First Chair: Lessons in Scaling Vacation Rentals

Jamie Lane (0:05)

Welcome to the STR Data Lab.

Welcome to the STR Data Lab. I'm Jamie Lane, Chief Economist at AirDNA, and we have today a really exciting desk. We have Bob Milne, the COO and President of First Chair Destinations on the show. Bob, welcome.

Bob Milne (0:26)

Jamie, thanks so much for having me. I look forward to kind of have our conversation today. A lot to talk about.

Jamie Lane (0:32)

Yeah. So, if there's a list of people that have been in this industry for a long time, sort of making big waves sort of before the OTAs were really around and sort of seeing the evolution of the industry, and you were really top of the list of someone I wanted to talk to. So, I mean, well, there was thousands of home in Steamboat, which, man, I love Steamboat as a destination to visit and ski at. You're at Wyndham, the large sort of brand that Vacasa was, and now you were there through the IPO, now the sale, and now with First Chair. I don't think anyone has sort of seen inside the industry at the scale that you have.

So, really excited to dig in with you.

Bob Milne (1:25)

Yeah, a lot of battle scars here, Jamie, but I'm here, so I'll be able to give you some of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Jamie Lane (1:35)

Yeah, so maybe just let's start with First Chair, and then we'll sort of walk backwards.

And you were obviously at Vacasa. Now you guys have launched First Chair, which was a subset of the Vacasa portfolio. And so what have the first few months looked like in this new company?

Bob Milne (1:59)

It's been really fun. I mean, it's kind of like back to my roots a little bit here. I mean, having gone through that kind of, had my own company, the entrepreneurial, going through selling to Wyndham, then moving into the Vacasa world, going public, and then Vacasa deciding to sell to Casago and become private again. It really kind of gave us the opportunity because part of the way that this was able to kind of materialize was because Casago was going to put everything into the franchise model. And when that kind of started to surface as an opportunity, I was able to connect with one of my good colleagues from Wyndham, Rishi Nigam.

And we worked closely at Wyndham together, building the Wyndham Vacation Rentals brand. And we said, hey, you know what, let's do something kind of special and fun here with the ski product. And me living in Steamboat and being a skier, and he's a skier as well, we said, hey, this might be a great opportunity to do something that is kind of more than just saying that it's a niche, actually being a niche, like really focusing in on the ski destinations and the skiers. And we all know skiers are kind of a unique breed, and there's a lot of opportunity to kind of build off of that.

Jamie Lane (3:21)

Yeah. So maybe taking that back to Steamboat, and you guys had thousands of homes back then, and then it was sort of operating during the 1990s, 2000s.

What has the industry sort of needed, or what have you sort of brought back into First Chair that you first learned back in those Steamboat days? Yeah.

Bob Milne (3:48)

I mean, look, I think the one thing that we all as an industry got kind of, we kind of drank the Kool-Aid, if you will, and kind of started to believe our own stuff, that technology would solve everything, right? And so, I mean, you go back even to just the whole Vacasa IPO. I mean, we went public on the NASDAQ, right? So you think about that, you know, that's pretty interesting, a vacation rental company, a hospitality company, you know, doing their IPO on the NASDAQ. And I think it's, oh, we're a tech company. But I think what's brought me full circle is that, you know, when I was building my company Steamboat Resorts and the resort company, yeah, you need technology, of course, you know, you need technology, but at the same time, it's really still a hospitality, a relationship, a people business. And I think that's what's got me the most excited. Jamie's kind of come in full circle because, look, when you're, you know, doing the Wall Street game, which is fine, it's fun, it's interesting, and a lot of good things happen from it, but you're playing that, you know, live and die by the quarter. And I think this business, it's much more of a, you know, live and die by your relationship and the people and the partnerships that you have that are kind of supporting you every single day.