$160 Million to Go Shopping For Companies

HomeAway is a vacation rental site. I had a brief jog around the site, and it looks both well populated with properties and easy to use. They have, for example, 402 listings for Costa Rica (yay, I can link to the results page). They only have 14 listings for Vancouver, but you get the idea.

Anyhow, according to The Next Net and the Austin Business Journal, HomeAway recently raised $160 million to acquire their competitors and clean up the online vacation rental space:

The company has already begun that expansion through the acquisition of VBRO.com, or Vacation Rentals by Owner. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. VRBO.com, HomeAway’s largest competitor, was founded in 1996 and as amassed nearly 65,000 properties worldwide. VRBO.com provides rent-by-owner vacation properties in the U.S.

Combined with VRBO.com’s inventory, HomeAway’s portfolio of vacation rentals comprises more than 130,000 properties in nearly 100 countries.

If you happen to be another player in the sector (like Zonder.com, apparently), you’ve got to be rubbing your hands together in glee.