Property Management Software Maker Guesty Notches $50 Million, Acquires Your Porter

Property management software firm Guesty has finished a funding round for $50 million, a company blog says.

That brings the total amount of funding to $110 million.

In addition, the company has also acquired Dutch company Your Porter, which focuses on a mobile-first product for property management companies.

That, along with Guesty’s other recent acquisition of MyVR, will continue Guesty’s goal of powering various hosting businesses, including both small, family-run operations and enterprise-sized hospitality brands. The company also plans to continue consolidation in the space, the blog says.

In terms of what’s next, Guesty writes that it plans to “use the investment and our growing team to power a year of hypergrowth in key markets, enhance our product capabilities to serve diverse customer segments, onboard top-notch talent to deliver top-notch service and solutions and ultimately, be a pillar of support for the entrepreneurs who have built businesses off the democratization of hospitality.”

Guesty saw an increase in services as the pandemic made it so that consumers needed more distance and space from others. People needed to work from home, and others chose to explore the world as “digital nomads,” and longer-stay rentals helped with those goals.

The company posits that the demand for short-term rental will keep going, as the vaccines keep getting distributed and people continue their working from anywhere.

Guesty U.S. summer short-term rental reservation volume for 2021 is set at 282 percent higher than it was in summer 2020 and 32 percent higher than what it was pre-COVID in 2019, the blog says.

In real estate, the market saw an unusual year in 2020, mostly grinding to a halt in the beginning of the year and then coming back with a force in the second half.

HomeLight CEO Drew Uher said there was an amount of “real estate fatigue” happening in the wake of that, and that there was a real lack of housing supply.