When San Francisco short-term rental startup WanderJaunt shut down in late June, it reportedly laid off as many as 200 people and left users scrambling after their reservations were canceled.
Milwaukee short-term rental startup Frontdesk Inc. saw it as an opportunity.
Frontdesk has since added 33 former WanderJaunt units to its own portfolio of short-term rental units around the country. The units are across four different buildings in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona; and Austin, Texas, Frontdesk co-founder and chief product officer Jesse DePinto said.
"This is just the start; we think there's hundreds more," DePinto said.
Frontdesk, which has about 1,000 total units across 150 locations in more than 30 U.S. markets, was already operating in Phoenix, Tempe and Austin, which made it easy to quickly jump on those opportunities, DePinto said. It negotiated directly with the property owners, rather than with WanderJaunt, to acquire the furnished units, he said.
This isn't the first time Frontdesk has taken a "roll-up" approach to growth, DePinto said. In 2020, it added 77 units in Indianapolis, New Orleans, Tempe and Pittsburgh that were previously managed by two different competitors who went out of business that year, Stay Alfred and Domio, he said. Frontdesk has since expanded its relationship with some of those property owners, he added.
Although Frontdesk wasn't forced to fold in 2020 as those competitors were, it laid off 35 employees — 16% of its staff at the time — due to pandemic-related challenges.
Frontdesk — which now has more than 300 employees, according to DePinto, and recently made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies for the second year in a row — hopes to add more former WanderJaunt units to its portfolio, DePinto said. It's also hiring and would consider applicants who formerly worked for WanderJaunt, he added.
"We hope to be of service to any property owner, guest or employee who was impacted by the WaunderJaunt news," DePinto said.
WaunderJaunt was founded in 2016 and raised $57 million at a $105 million valuation in a Series B round announced in July 2021, Bay Area Inno reported citing PitchBook data.
Frontdesk, founded in Milwaukee in 2017, had raised a total of $18 million as of last summer, according to Wisconsin Inno reporting.
