First a Little History - VRBO started as a family business with a single listing of our Breckenridge, Colorado condo in 1995. Wow, have things changed! Today, VRBO advertises nearly 65,000 vacation properties all over the world and is used by more than 25 million travelers each year. VRBO’s success is tied directly to the enthusiasm of its members (more than 50% of new listings come as a result of referrals by existing VRBO members). To support this growth, we now employ a dedicated staff of nearly 40 people.
VRBO - The Early Years
Dave and I were college sweethearts. We met at Point Loma College (a small Christian College) in San Diego, California, and we both graduated in 1979. We were married in 1980 and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during our early married years.
Looking back, I guess you could say that our VRBO story really begins with two unexpected events in our lives. Those events certainly felt like negatives when they occurred, but we truly believe Romans 8:28 which says "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." and looking back, we can definitely see God’s leading in our lives, even when it didn’t make sense to us at the time...
Event #1 – While visiting my parents during spring break in 1979, I was injured in an automobile accident.
Event #2 – Eight years later, in 1987, the technology company Dave was working for lost a major contract. In a round of cutbacks that eventually shut down the company, Dave found himself without a job.
Amazingly enough, those two happenings started off a chain of events that ultimately led to the formation of "Vacation Rentals by Owner" - VRBO.COM.
The insurance settlement that resulted from my auto accident was used as a down payment on a $44,000 fixer upper home in Richmond, California. After repairing and moving into that home, we rented our original home to long term tenants and we became landlords for the very first time.
Dave's subsequent employment search in 1987 led him to take a job with United Airlines in Colorado. So, Dave and I with our two young sons, packed up and moved our family to Aurora, Colorado. (Our sons, Matthew and Michael, are now college age, and in our "unbiased opinion" they are two of the finest young men you could ever hope to meet!)
After relocating our family to Colorado, we sold - our rental home in California and reinvested the funds in a ski condo in Breckenridge, Colorado. Our desire was to rent our condo to skiers as a short-term vacation rental so we could use it ourselves every once in while! <grin>
So, we owned a ski condo (when I say "we" – what I really mean is "us and the mortgage company"!)… but we knew we wouldn’t be able to afford to make the payments if we didn't figure out a way to keep the condo rented during Colorado’s short four month ski season each year.
Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, so we signed up for our very own 800 number, we got a merchant account to accept credit cards from our renters, and we began advertising by placing a small 15 word ad with no pictures in the back of one of the major ski magazines. That's how we used to do "vacation rentals by owner" back in the good ‘ole days. (BTW - 5 months of this advertising in the early 90's cost us more than 4 times the base price of a ONE YEAR ad on VRBO today).
I still remember Dave wishing we had a more cost effective way to advertise our ski condo than to posting a small and expensive classified ad. In the fall of 1995, our Breckenridge ski condo became listing #1 in Dave's first attempt at building a web site as a way to reach potential renters, and VRBO was born.
Dave continued to build web pages for other property owners for "free" over the next year. He would come home from his full time programming job and disappear into the basement to work for hours on end on his newbie website. It wasn't until he began adding photos to the listings that we started charging members to be included. Then Dave had to teach me to help him with answering email, updating and publishing ads, posting photos, and we worked together to create our initial payment system too. I remember hoping that someday we could get to the point where we would be adding a new listing each day… Wow, wouldn’t that be awesome <smile>! In October of 2006, VRBO averaged over 90 new listings per day!
For a few years, it was just Dave and I, working together out of a room in our basement that kept the site running. But as VRBO continued to grow, we found that we couldn't keep up with everything and do–it-all ourselves anymore. So we started asking friends if they would like to have a high tech job working with us in our basement!?!<grin> When Dave finally figured out how to make the database available over the Internet, we did get our basement room back and our staff members were able to begin working from their own homes. It was a win-win situation all around. We do have an office in St Thomas, but all of our stateside VRBO staff members still work from their own homes.
Probably the scariest decision we had to make in VRBO’s early days was deciding when we could quit our "real" jobs and take a leap of faith… believing that this little Internet business Dave dreamed up would bring in enough income to take care of our family. I have to confess though that when quitting time came first for me, I didn’t mind hanging up my part-time RN badge and saying good-bye to working nightshifts at the hospital. Dave continued his full time job with benefits probably longer than he needed to, but when our VRBO income continued to exceed his programming income, we knew it was time for him to go full time with VRBO as well.
So that’s our basic VRBO story. We’ve had a great run. We’ve had plenty of laughs over the years and some tears sprinkled in along the way too. It’s been quite a grand adventure watching our VRBO baby grow to what it has become today. We have certainly been very blessed and we know that HomeAway is going to take good care of VRBO from here on.
God bless you all,
Dave and Lynn Clouse - VRBO founders
VRBO is Vacation Rentals by Owner http:/www.vrbo.com
"VRBO", "Vacation Rentals by Owner", & "Carpe Vacationum-'Seize the Vacation'" Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off
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