The home rental space is booming and Spain is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations. The combination of these two factors might explain the existence of Lodgify, a startup based in Barcelona that offers home owners the possibility of building good looking websites for their properties, as well as a central location to handle payments, reservations or ads across a wide variety of sites. Think of Squarespace but applied to the vacation rental (VR) industry.
Lodgify was founded in mid 2012 by Naveen Sharma, Dennis Klett and Marco de Gregorio. The startup got accepted into the Seedcamp family in 2014 and was selected as one of the winners, an experience that Naveen recommends to other Spanish startups. “Being part of Seedcamp is no guarantee for success – the hard work still needs to be done obviously. But it may just provide you that pinch you need to make your company successful.”, he tells me.
The startup focused from the very beginning on the American market -the biggest in the world for VR- but has since then launched versions of its site in Spanish, Italian and German. “The European VR market has become a $42 billion industry. However, many home owners don’t have access to cheap and innovative technology to manage their properties”, claims Naveen. To adapt to owners’ needs, Lodgify offers various pricing plans that go from $9 to $39 a month, depending on the amount of properties they want to manage and other features. The company claims it has been “growing rapidly” in the last few months and owners manage more than 1,000 properties through the website. Y Combinator startup MyVR is one of Lodgify’s main competitors.
Having finished their stay at Seedcamp, Naveel and the rest of the team are back in Barcelona and currently looking to raise their first round of financing. “Startup life in London is as vibrant as hectic as the city itself. There is a lot of energy to absorb from that. Unfortunately it’s just too expensive over time and it limits the length of your stay”, says Naveen.