Happy Halloween everyone!👻
We'd like to start this week off by congratulating Wildbit on 20 years of business. If you don't know who Wildbit is, then maybe you know some of the products they've created. One of their most prominent products, which OwnerRez uses for it's email system, is Postmark. We love Postmark and have used it for a long time. If you've ever set up a "verified sender email address" in OwnerRez, that's the same Postmark that sends the yellow instructions with DNS instructions.
But beyond the Postmark product specifically, we love Wildbit as a company because of the culture they've created. For 20 years, they've maintained the perspective that companies should prioritize people first - not just "customer" people but also "employee" people. They started out as a small startup in Philadelphia and have grown to a team of more than 30 and over 100,000 customers.
Here at OwnerRez, we partner with many companies and use lots of products to power our software, but Wildbit stands out as a great example of what businesses should strive to be. So congrats on the 20 years, Wildbit!
In other not-so-fun news, we're getting reports that some OwnerRez users have had their Vrbo accounts compromised through successful phishing attacks. Hackers will send a targeted link that looks like it's a Vrbo booking request, which leads you to a Vrbo-looking website, which leads you to input your username and password, which allows them to record and use to access your real Vrbo account,
Needless to say, make sure that the links you click on from Vrbo are actually from Vrbo. Also, this is another great reason you should move to using the Vrbo API connection we offer. Having an API connection makes it much harder for hackers to do anything with your listings. Even if they successfully gain access to your Vrbo account, they can't change your listings, rates, availability and so on. All of that is driven from OwnerRez. In fact, even you yourself cannot change that stuff from the Vrbo dashboard because of how the API mode operates. So just a reminder here to stop using iCal and switch to API!
Airbnb is gearing up to list its shares on the Nasdaq. Earlier this month they aimed to raise $3 billion in IPO, giving Airbnb a valuation of over $30 billion! We heard about the plans to go public earlier this year, but now it's reported that Airbnb wants to do this before the end of the year. While COVID may have put a dent in the vacation rental industry earlier in the year, things are very much up for Airbnb which has recorded record booking days ever since. As of right now there is no official date when the IPO will take place, but we'll be sure to let you know.
Our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt, has been featured in PropTech magazine, a magazine devoted to real estate news, technology and software! He was interviewed a few weeks back, where he gave insight into OwnerRez's goals and how we try to achieve them. The article and profile will be included in an upcoming magazine issue, but you can read an advanced copy here.
