TurnKey Raises $31 Million as Vacation Home Rental Management Stays Hot

Investors continue to pour money into startups claiming to use technology to automate and improve vacation rental property management. TurnKey, an Austin, Texas-based startup, said Monday that it had raised $31 million in a Series D round of funding. Existing investor Adams Street Partners led the round. Altos Ventures and two new institutional investors also pitched in. The funding brings the total that Turnkey has raised to $72 million. The news comes on the heels of the February 2018 report that Wyndham agreed to sell its European division, which manages 110,000 properties, to a private equity firm for $1.3 billion. Last October, Vacasa raised a $103.5 million Series B round. Sonder, another property management company, has publicized a total of $13 million in funding. The Information reported in January 2018 that the startup had raised about $30 million in an undisclosed Series B last year and is seeking a fresh round. Rented.com, which provides financing to the vacation rental sector, created a $125 million fund for financings in December. Promise or Fizz? Skeptics look at the fundings and see an exuberant mood in private equity and venture capital as investors look for higher returns. Optimists see the activity as a long-overdue validation of the sector that is enabling different tiers of specialization for diverse parts of the market. As context, the startups that have received funding in the past 18 months managed fewer than 25,000 properties in the U.S. collectively out of an estimated hundreds of thousands of properties. Competition at this stage of such a fragmented market development may not be an overriding concern. The largest U.S. full-service provider remains Wyndham Vacation Rentals after the sell-off of its European business, as Skift Research has noted. Vacasa is the second-largest in the U.S., it said. It manages more than 8,000 homes globally, without specifying its U.S. numbers. A couple of analysts named TurnKey as the third-largest, full-service U.S. vacation rental management company by the number of homes under management. The company said it had signed more than 3,500 U.S. private accommodations. The three companies are similar in that they are full-service providers that handle everything from listing a