AVANTSTAY

Sean Breuner founded AvantStay in Los Angeles in 2017 after getting frustrated with the vacation rental experience firsthand. The listing photos look great.

The reality is often disappointing. His idea was to fix that by not being a marketplace at all — instead of listing third-party properties and hoping for the best, AvantStay would lease homes directly, design and furnish them to a consistent standard, hire its own hospitality staff, and deliver a hotel-quality experience in a house-quality space.

The model is expensive to build but creates a product that a pure marketplace platform structurally cannot match.

AvantStay leases vacation homes from property owners on long-term contracts, takes full operational control, and then rents them out to travelers at premium rates. The property owner gets stable guaranteed income.

The traveler gets a consistently managed luxury property. AvantStay keeps the spread between what it pays in rent and what it charges guests, plus management fees.

It is essentially a hospitality business wearing a tech startup jacket. The tech part — dynamic pricing, booking software, guest management systems — is real, but the core model is old-school: lease a property, rent it at a markup, operate it well.

AvantStay's core product is the managed vacation home — fully furnished, professionally designed, stocked with amenities, cleaned to hotel standards between guests. Properties span beachfront houses, mountain ski chalets, desert modern retreats, and lakefront cabins across the US.

Many properties sleep 8-20 guests, making them the default choice for group bookings. AvantStay also offers a concierge service for guests — activity booking, catering, and transportation coordination.

Its tech platform handles dynamic pricing and booking management, though this is more operational infrastructure than a consumer product.

AvantStay grew by targeting the group travel market specifically — families, bachelorette weekends, corporate retreats, friend groups who want to stay together under one roof. This is the segment that Airbnb's marketplace approach serves least reliably.

A group of 12 people booking a house together has enormous tolerance for premium pricing and enormous intolerance for surprises. AvantStay attacked that segment with curated properties designed for groups — multiple bedrooms, amenities like hot tubs and game rooms, professional cleaning and restocking between guests.

They expanded geographically by entering top domestic US vacation markets: Scottsdale, the Florida coast, mountain destinations in Colorado and Utah, wine country in California.

The unit economics are brutal in this model. AvantStay leases homes on multi-year contracts, which means it carries fixed costs even during slow seasons or when bookings fall short.

The vacation rental market has gotten more competitive and more price-sensitive since COVID. Airbnb's platform hosts dropped prices aggressively in 2022-2023 as demand normalized post-pandemic.

AvantStay's premium properties need high occupancy rates to cover their lease obligations. If occupancy drops, the spread between lease costs and rental revenue compresses fast.

The hospitality business has always been hard. The AvantStay model is a high-fixed-cost version of an already hard business.

AvantStay raised $70 million across multiple funding rounds, with investors including 3L Capital and Jackson Square Ventures. The company raised a $22 million Series A in 2019 and followed with larger rounds through the COVID travel boom.

The fact that it attracted venture capital into a capital-intensive hospitality model reflects investor appetite during the short-term rental boom years of 2020-2022, when Airbnb and Vrbo revenues were spiking and everyone wanted a premium slice of that market.