Short Term Rentals Roundup: Airbnb Appointment, OYO IPO and a New Rival

There have been a few important pieces of news coming from the world of short-term and vacation rentals this week.

OYO Eyes IPO

The Indian travel and short stay aggregator is said to be preparing for its debut as a public company. The Softbank backed firm is believed to be seeking between $1-1.2 billion by listing on the Mumbai stock exchange.

Although the company itself has not commented on the matter, the deal could be put in place as early as next week.

OYO counts Airbnb, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India and Hero Enterprise among its backers. The firm is currently building the next generation of vacation marketplace products in partnership with Microsoft which reportedly valued OYO at $9 billion.

OYO is reported to have generated $950 million in revenue in 2019 before the pandemic. Despite serious cutbacks during the height of the pandemic, Indian media outlets cited comments from CEO Ritesh Agarwal in March of this year that the startup was EBITDA positive.

Airbnb Reinforces Legal and Ethics Team

The San Francisco based vacation rentals giant is bolstering its legal, compliance, safety and security teams.

New appointments include John Polito as associate general counsel for global risk and regulatory; corporate counsel Alison Bloch; Blake McKenzie senior associate Juliana Marques as senior principal for tax; senior privacy counsel Julienne Chang; and Courtney Shike as counsel for stakeholder initiatives.

Meanwhile, General Council Peter Urias has been named Chief Ethics Officer for the company.

Airbnb endured some bad publicity in June when a Bloomberg story uncovered how the company had paid hosts and victims not to "imply responsibility or liability" on the firm.

JLL Launches a Short Term Lettings Rival

Commercial real estate company JLL has launched a new platform which it hopes will prove to be a rival for Booking.com and Airbnb in the UK.

Shortstays.jll.co.uk is being marketed as a "more trusted and professional alternative" to its big brand competitors and features stays of between 3 nights and 12 months and already has some 1,000 listings.

The platform has been developed in partnership with British proptech firm Lavanda which specialises in connecting real estate portfolio brokers and home-sharing services.