Short-term rental manager Pillow Homes raises $2.7 million
Pillow Homes, a San Francisco-based startup that offers property management services for short-terms rentals, has raised $2.65 million in fresh funding.
Founders Sean Conway and Justin Miller are travel enthusiasts who joined together to create a new way for travelers to open their homes to guests. They founded the company to bring freedom to hosts while giving more guests the opportunity to have a home anywhere.
It also launched a new service that it says can guarantee a minimum income for hosts who rent out pads on services such as San Francisco-based Airbnb and rivals VRBO and Homeaway.
Pillow, previously called Airenvy, has up until now offered a service where it takes 15 percent of the cut for short-term rentals in exchange for managing those properties on behalf of owners. Now the year-old startup is launching a “fixed-income guarantee model” that it says is the first in the industry.
The new model gives homeowners a pre-determined monthly income for their rentals. Pillow said that using criteria such as location, number of bedrooms and amenities as a guide, it “accurately able to predict both occupancy and daily pricing.”
Pillow said that in peak times last year, its services was taking more than 250 reservations per week. It manages rentals in San Francisco, the Bay Area, Sonoma, Napa Valley and Los Angeles, and its service offers guests standardized amenities and a point-of-contact throughout their stay.