Three years after leaving Vacasa and Scott Breon is back in the real estate startup game. This time he is with Cupertino, California-based Poplar Homes.
Breon was recently elevated to the president role at the company. He started as an adviser three years ago and in 2021 was brought on as chief strategy officer. He is bringing the lessons learned from starting and scaling Vacasa, which was founded by his brother Eric Breon, and where he was an early leader and executive.
Where Vacasa worked in the short-term rental market, Poplar works in long-term rentals. The company has built a platform that works with property owners to manage and maintain properties. For the renters, it has tools for viewing and getting approved for properties online. It also has financial tools to help renters move into homeownership.
The target homeowner customers are those with small portfolios of homes. The company, at this point, isn’t working with the big private equity landlords in the rental market.
In this company Breon sees a similar playbook to how Vacasa grew. He was brought on board to focus on acquisitions. Along the way he has brought on several past Vacasa leaders. Breon is based in Bend but the company has about 10 people in Portland.
However, Poplar does have a key difference from Vacasa.
“In a lot of ways the long-term rental market is easier than the short term,” he said. “When you buy a vacation rental there may be 40 future guests that book. With long-term rentals it’s one tenant.”
That means there aren't as much logistics and other work spent on cleaning and there isn’t seasonality in revenue, he said. Breon left Vacasa in 2020. In December 2021 Vacasa went public via SPAC merger and it has struggled in recent years and seen its own leadership turnover lately.
The biggest lesson Breon learned from Vacasa that he is now employing at Poplar is empathetic leadership. This is especially important, he said, in the integration of acquired companies and employees.
“When you join a startup there is a level of chaos. Everything is new,” he said. “When you buy a company those employees aren’t joining by choice.”
In that case, he said, you can’t bring them into chaos. They need order and empathy.
Vacasa grew quickly in part by buying up other vacation rental property managers. Acquisitions is a way to scale the geographic footprint fast, said Breon. Last year, Poplar said it made nine acquisitions in high-growth markets. However, Breon noted that at Poplar the ultimate goal is organic growth with people deciding to join the platform on their own.
Breon’s introduction to the company came three years ago through a cold direct message on LinkedIn from Poplar’s co-founder and CEO Greg Toschi. Breon had just left Vacasa and was happily retired.
But, he responded to the message and from there would chat with Toschi from time to time.
“The basics were similar to Vacasa. (You) overlay a similar tech stack on how to find tenants and owners and create a marketplace and (create processes) to manage in-market employees all over the country,” he said.
Breon gets a lot of cold DMs. Toschi’s message stood out because he made it relatable.
“He mentioned the challenges and the unsexy stuff,” that comes with building and scaling a company, Breon said. Finding that connection when reaching out is important, he said, for any entrepreneurs doing cold outreach.
Breon officially joined the company as part of a $110 million raise that was secured under two phases. The first round was $53 million announced in March last year and the second part was raised internally, he said.
While people might send a cold DM to network, there are fewer who do so to ask for help. Breon has seen this and applies the flip side to himself. When he sees people posting celebratory funding news or other milestones he reaches out to those founders and acknowledges the challenges that have likely come with the news.
“People don’t realize the unsexy side of a big round. (It likely means) more board members and more personalities to manage,” he said.
“People don’t ask for help whether in life or in business,” he added, and for entrepreneurs those two elements are frequently the same. “It takes a community to get through challenges. Through personal experience, I make it a habit that if I know someone is having a challenging time to reach out and let them know you are not alone.”
Poplar is a remote-first company. It has about 650 employees and about half are in the Philippines, where the company’s development team is located along with co-founder and CTO Rico Mok.
