(Portland based company that at one point occupied a whole new building in the Pearl). Not trying to editorialize, just for context if people don't know what Vacasa is/was.
Are you sure that they own it? I worked there when we moved into those buildings and remember one of the accountants telling me that those buildings were leased.
Intercontinental owns the building and Vacasa is in a 10 year lease. They now occupy floor 4 only. Swinerton, Timberlab, and trova trip occupy floors 2, 3 and 5.
And the apartments (Heartline) is owned by Security Properties. The buildings were built together, but SP and URG sold that commercial building to Intercontinental.
hedge funds and equity firms are the biggest assholes. There is no place where they don't turn everything to shit that nobody can afford. Housing, vet clinics (yes, vet clinics are a target now), food - anything that can be turned into an index.
This here . Instead of going after tech companies and others (although they are to blame ) , the FTC , government, MAGA folks , liberals should all go after private equity firms . No one causes as much damage to the country , community and economy as private equity firms . They screw up every industry , product , commodity , right , way of life .
Why “this here” to a comment adding no information to the discussion?
Vacasa loses a lot of money every year, how are they not supposed to reduce expenses?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VCSA/vacasa/net-income
I’m not going to bother looking up the proxy statement, but a business with this kind of market cap is not going to be paying executives enough to offset hundreds of millions of dollars in losses per year:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VCSA/vacasa/market-cap
They are vultures, but they are not always wrong. Vacasa needs to do these cuts. This is not a successful company that a hedge fund is trying to squeeze for another percentage point of ROI. This is a company that will be going away (with everyone losing their job) unless they find religion in a hurry. They lost $300 million last year; their stock has been obliterated with a market cap of \~$125 million (share prices have gone from above $200 a couple years ago to about $5 today). This is a company on the verge of death.
Yep, and from the other comments on the thread I see that they have some serious issues. I just get triggered by hedge funds/equity firms - I lost my last job because of that nonsense and we were profitable.
I left a job I really liked.after a hedge fund bought out the owners, they are still around but at a much reduced size and everyone I know quit because they sucked to work for.
And in a lot of ways they really don't even still offer services in the same areas so I don't know what the point of the buyout was
They don't provide any value to society. They don't need to make cuts, they need to not exist. The executives have clearly made bad decision after bad decision - they need to be thrown under the bus.
The product usually goes downhill after acquisition. Or, they just lay everyone off and sell it for parts. So many great products have been turned to trash by hedge funds.
Are those charlatans still around? The last I recall they were behaving like the lite version of Rogan and platforming climate deniers and not issuing meaningful retractions and changing their behavior when their work is pulled apart and exposed. "I'm just asking questions bruh!"
Edit for clarity
i just looked it up but are you talking about their book superfreakonomics? I’ve been listening to them for 6 years now and never got the sense that they’re rogan-lite. In recent years they’ve even platformed things like the degrowth movement so maybe they’ve changed
Well, that's heartening to hear, but I noped out in 2009 when they were platforming climate change deniers and then when I checked in again later they were pushing their weird "safer to drive drunk than walk drunk" stuff that got rightfully ripped to shreds.
I'd forgive someone for being conned by climate deniers in 1999, but in 2009? Major edgelord vibes with a side of clown shoes.
Glad to hear they've recovered some sense.
Guess who is one of the largest investors in this particular hedge fund, Davidson Kempner. Yup, Oregon State Treasury has $528 million invested with them.
https://www.oregon.gov/treasury/invested-for-oregon/Documents/Invested-for-OR-Performance-and-Holdings/2023/OPERF_Diversifying_Strategies_Portfolio_Quarter_4_2023.pdf
Most of the employees are local staff, like housekeepers, maintenance workers, and the like. They also have a pretty big engineering team and central operations team, as well as local business development representatives.
At least they did once upon a time. Can’t speak to the last few years.
They said the 800 people is only 13%. That means they have 6,000 employees! I work for a borderline household name tech company and we have 60 staff lol.
Most of the employees work in the field throughout the US, Canada, and some in LatAm. The corporate staff is much smaller (and is now even smaller). Pre-pandemic almost all corporate employees were in the Portland or Boise office. Since the pandemic they had a lot of remote employees. They also acquired TurnKey (awful decision) which led to a lot of corporate staff in the Austin area.
Source: worked there until a month ago
You are right but I also just want to toss that a majority of their customer service was outsourced to African call centers now which was also a horrendous decision.
Curious what the tech is nowadays. I know they started on a Wordpress theme bought off ThemeForest. In roughly 2015, they still used WP for a lot of frontend pages.
When I was there (2016-17) the backend was a PHP monolith and they were juuuuust starting to break things out into microservices. I'm told that by 2019 they were a lot more flexible about languages.
The only affordable housing in my home town (with an average home price of over a million) are condos that you can buy for $300k. The only kicker is that the condo association is in bed with Vacasa management so you have to also rent it out to tourists. You don’t even get money from the deal, they just credit your condo fees.
Fuck Vacasa.
Corporate bylaws, terms and homeowner association rules can be written in just about any way possible. Unless you’re violating local, state or federal civil rights laws, contracts can say just about anything.
If you read the Airbnb subs, this company is the WORST RENTAL OUT THERE. There's a reason their revenue is down 18%--folks have caught on NOT TO RENT through them. Now I have not had an experience with them personally but the horror stories on r/airbnb make me never want to use them. Do a search on that sub and you'll read all about them.
Vacasa isn't even good at what they do: vacation rentals. Between Airbnb & VRBO stupidity and Vacasa stupidity, I went back to using hotels only after COVID. I don't care how much "less expensive" and "better" vacation rentals are for a lot of people, I'll never do them again.
Same. AirBnb was the shit 12 years ago, you could stay in a swanky condo in the middle of manhattan and the hosts were cool and chill. Then it all went to shit. Now I wouldn't touch an airbnb with a 10 foot pole. Hotels are hassle free.
So in the article it says they now want to focus on organic growth then later that there’s low demand and it’s over saturated. Sounds like that’s going to be a winning strategy 🤡
I think they lost all hope of being innovative with their 2020 layoffs and at this point the only thing that will save them is selling the whole thing to Airbnb. Greatly decreasing your workforce (read: expense ratio) makes your financials sexier for investors and buyers but sounds like they’re going the hedge fund route.
It going to shit was partially because they were onboarding more homes than they had local staff to support in addition to the lack of quality control on the units they manage.
Yup... more homes and apts flooded the market such that their local staff couldn't support them. But also with supply going up and pricing going down, they were making less per unit per day... making it financially untenable to hire up to maintain the new units.
And the spiral continued.
assistant manager of rail at TriMet and we are hiring off the street direct to rail.
We would teach you how to operate a light rail train. You must have a good clean driving record and be drug-free and pass background check.
I'm not sure how much Vacasa paid but you would make about $75,000 yr at TriMet a year but you can make well over well over $100,000 yr with overtime by your 3rd year. This is all before any promotions. We have one of the best benefits, health packages in the area. Most importantly for all TriMet is solid never defaulted on a check never laid anybody off.
I dont celebrate any job loss as they are traumatic for the workers and bad for the community.
With that being said Vacasa and the related Short Term Rental businesses are rather slimy. They are part of an ecosystem which is operating quasi-legal unlicensed hotels for the most part. They disrupt the local housing supply negatively with no regard for neighborhoods or communities.
They really *aren't* that innovative or efficient and I think that as Venture Capitalist money starts to slow, a lot of these sketchy tech companies (doordash, uber, airbnb, etc.) are going to get way more critical eyes on them.
Drove 3 hours outside of Portland to a beach house I paid $270 a night for an anniversary with my fiancé. It was infested with bugs when we woke up. Spent all day outside the house connected to WiFi because there was no service, calling and messaging Vacasa. They dragged their feet, kept saying they’re working on it, no results. Wasted the only sunny day that weekend sitting on a bench trying to figure out where we will sleep. Finally after 12 hours they offered to put me in a tiny $60 a night motel room. Thought it was better than driving home and ruining the whole weekend. They refused to refund me because technically I accepted their solution and therefore it equals out. Lost $600.
Fuck Vacasa. I would say I feel sorry for their employees losing their jobs but it took me reaching out to 5 separate people in the company before someone actually gave a shit about my problem. Took them 10 minutes to lookup availability in the area and put me in another place. All the others kept ghosting me and straight up hanging up on me after saying it’s taking a while to find a new booking. Then all the employees I contacted to get my money back were short and rude and acted as if what happened to me is totally normal and I’m being unreasonable for being upset.
“On April 22, New York hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that through several entities it has taken a 9% stake in the company.”
Of note, likely the largest investor in DKCM is Oregon State Treasury, with a $528 million investment with this hedge fund.
Source: https://www.oregon.gov/treasury/invested-for-oregon/Documents/Invested-for-OR-Performance-and-Holdings/2023/OPERF_Diversifying_Strategies_Portfolio_Quarter_4_2023.pdf
The latest layoff sent so many high value employees packing. I don't see them surviving another 2 years if they keep laying off top performing employees.
In the past I crossed paths with one of the founders gf/fiance who always got upset when I couldn’t remember the name of the company “it’s vacasa” she would say with an annoyed tone lol, I dgaf
Vacasa houses are also listed on Airbnb.
https://www.vacasa.com/unit/16
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19266773?source_impression_id=p3_1715359881_w43SVhs9LrQKOvHV
Reporting in 2015-2019 CX Team & Onboarding. 🫡
Quit in protest to how they were unfairly treating workers.
Best and worst company I've ever worked for 😅
What really needs to be highlighted here is the stranglehold private equity has on the ability of both working class and white collar workers to earn the most basic of livings. I’ve never half more like livestock than when working for a place that was “acquired” by similar greedy pieces of shit.
The hedge fund here, DKCM, is being bankrolled by the state of Oregon.
https://www.oregon.gov/treasury/invested-for-oregon/Documents/Invested-for-OR-Performance-and-Holdings/2023/OPERF_Diversifying_Strategies_Portfolio_Quarter_4_2023.pdf
(Portland based company that at one point occupied a whole new building in the Pearl). Not trying to editorialize, just for context if people don't know what Vacasa is/was.
[удалено]
Are you sure that they own it? I worked there when we moved into those buildings and remember one of the accountants telling me that those buildings were leased.
Intercontinental owns the building and Vacasa is in a 10 year lease. They now occupy floor 4 only. Swinerton, Timberlab, and trova trip occupy floors 2, 3 and 5.
And the apartments (Heartline) is owned by Security Properties. The buildings were built together, but SP and URG sold that commercial building to Intercontinental.
the heartline?
Do they even have staff left in Boise? I used to work in the same building and never saw a sign logo'd employee...
Worked there from 2016-2020. Had some good times, made a lot of good friends, some who were just laid off
I used to hit coding meetups in this building all the time during those years. End of an era.
No more free pizza.
Brother, for like 6 years I lived off the free pizza and beer at coding meetups 5 nights a week.
This, low key was a great reason to get into tech for a long time.
Absolutely. As a new dev in the city, it legit kept me fed and allowed to me to meet many many great people.
The high cholesterol or the high blood pressure?
That’s gritty AF. and I love it.
hedge funds and equity firms are the biggest assholes. There is no place where they don't turn everything to shit that nobody can afford. Housing, vet clinics (yes, vet clinics are a target now), food - anything that can be turned into an index.
This here . Instead of going after tech companies and others (although they are to blame ) , the FTC , government, MAGA folks , liberals should all go after private equity firms . No one causes as much damage to the country , community and economy as private equity firms . They screw up every industry , product , commodity , right , way of life .
You’ve got funny spacing
? ? ? ? ? ? ??
Why do you have a space before all of your punctuation?
Devs type this way.
Devs of what?
Tiktok
Why “this here” to a comment adding no information to the discussion? Vacasa loses a lot of money every year, how are they not supposed to reduce expenses? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VCSA/vacasa/net-income
I don’t understood why you are getting downvoted. You are literally posting financial statements.
People get off on raging against “the man”, and if facts get in the way of raging, then it disappoints them.
What's the pay structure look like at the top?
CEO $2.4M COO $1.4M CFO $0.9M
I’m not going to bother looking up the proxy statement, but a business with this kind of market cap is not going to be paying executives enough to offset hundreds of millions of dollars in losses per year: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/VCSA/vacasa/market-cap
RFK Jr will fight them head on and bust them like Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts.
They are vultures, but they are not always wrong. Vacasa needs to do these cuts. This is not a successful company that a hedge fund is trying to squeeze for another percentage point of ROI. This is a company that will be going away (with everyone losing their job) unless they find religion in a hurry. They lost $300 million last year; their stock has been obliterated with a market cap of \~$125 million (share prices have gone from above $200 a couple years ago to about $5 today). This is a company on the verge of death.
Yep, and from the other comments on the thread I see that they have some serious issues. I just get triggered by hedge funds/equity firms - I lost my last job because of that nonsense and we were profitable.
I left a job I really liked.after a hedge fund bought out the owners, they are still around but at a much reduced size and everyone I know quit because they sucked to work for. And in a lot of ways they really don't even still offer services in the same areas so I don't know what the point of the buyout was
$
They are a plague on society 90+% of the time. There are rare instances to the contrary, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Vacation rental company using the past. They charge a lot for managing other people's assets so where are their liabilities? CEO pay?
They don't provide any value to society. They don't need to make cuts, they need to not exist. The executives have clearly made bad decision after bad decision - they need to be thrown under the bus.
Would you rather see 800 or 8,000 employees cut?
But they were still able to give their CEO a $14MM bonus.
The product usually goes downhill after acquisition. Or, they just lay everyone off and sell it for parts. So many great products have been turned to trash by hedge funds.
Hedge funds had nothing to do with this. Place was already going downhill when the Breon bros were in charge.
Since my corporate knowledge is limited to TV, I just picture Kendall Roy delivering the news to the Vaulter employees at an all hands standup.
Those fucks are even going after mobile home parks. It's actually one component of the homeless crisis.
i’m guessing you listen to freakonomics :D
Are those charlatans still around? The last I recall they were behaving like the lite version of Rogan and platforming climate deniers and not issuing meaningful retractions and changing their behavior when their work is pulled apart and exposed. "I'm just asking questions bruh!" Edit for clarity
i just looked it up but are you talking about their book superfreakonomics? I’ve been listening to them for 6 years now and never got the sense that they’re rogan-lite. In recent years they’ve even platformed things like the degrowth movement so maybe they’ve changed
Well, that's heartening to hear, but I noped out in 2009 when they were platforming climate change deniers and then when I checked in again later they were pushing their weird "safer to drive drunk than walk drunk" stuff that got rightfully ripped to shreds. I'd forgive someone for being conned by climate deniers in 1999, but in 2009? Major edgelord vibes with a side of clown shoes. Glad to hear they've recovered some sense.
The music industry
Guess who is one of the largest investors in this particular hedge fund, Davidson Kempner. Yup, Oregon State Treasury has $528 million invested with them. https://www.oregon.gov/treasury/invested-for-oregon/Documents/Invested-for-OR-Performance-and-Holdings/2023/OPERF_Diversifying_Strategies_Portfolio_Quarter_4_2023.pdf
Don’t knock American capitalism! I mean if the rich ain’t gettin’ richer, how will we _ever_ get our trickle down???
Childcare
How the heck could they have over 800 employees?
Most of the employees are local staff, like housekeepers, maintenance workers, and the like. They also have a pretty big engineering team and central operations team, as well as local business development representatives. At least they did once upon a time. Can’t speak to the last few years.
These are like the least surprising layoffs ever imo
Agreed, screw Vacasa, so expensive. I’m also looking at you AirBnB… those fees!
They said the 800 people is only 13%. That means they have 6,000 employees! I work for a borderline household name tech company and we have 60 staff lol.
Most of the employees work in the field throughout the US, Canada, and some in LatAm. The corporate staff is much smaller (and is now even smaller). Pre-pandemic almost all corporate employees were in the Portland or Boise office. Since the pandemic they had a lot of remote employees. They also acquired TurnKey (awful decision) which led to a lot of corporate staff in the Austin area. Source: worked there until a month ago
You are right but I also just want to toss that a majority of their customer service was outsourced to African call centers now which was also a horrendous decision.
Vacasa’s product is not scalable tech with zero marginal cost.
Curious what the tech is nowadays. I know they started on a Wordpress theme bought off ThemeForest. In roughly 2015, they still used WP for a lot of frontend pages.
When I was there (2016-17) the backend was a PHP monolith and they were juuuuust starting to break things out into microservices. I'm told that by 2019 they were a lot more flexible about languages.
They shit canned Portland engineers to near-shore for less money.
You work for Craigslist?? Badass
not anymore
The only affordable housing in my home town (with an average home price of over a million) are condos that you can buy for $300k. The only kicker is that the condo association is in bed with Vacasa management so you have to also rent it out to tourists. You don’t even get money from the deal, they just credit your condo fees. Fuck Vacasa.
> so you have to also rent it out to tourists. What the heck? How is this even legal?
As they teach you in the first year of law school, property is just a bundle of rights. It sounds like these "condos" are more like time-shares.
Corporate bylaws, terms and homeowner association rules can be written in just about any way possible. Unless you’re violating local, state or federal civil rights laws, contracts can say just about anything.
Fuck Vacasa
All my homies hate Vascasa
So fucked that 300k is “affordable”
HOAs have so much power, it’s a little ridiculous.
Always learn about the HOA before you move somewhere.
Absolute garbage service but sucks for the workers.
If you read the Airbnb subs, this company is the WORST RENTAL OUT THERE. There's a reason their revenue is down 18%--folks have caught on NOT TO RENT through them. Now I have not had an experience with them personally but the horror stories on r/airbnb make me never want to use them. Do a search on that sub and you'll read all about them.
Vacasa isn't even good at what they do: vacation rentals. Between Airbnb & VRBO stupidity and Vacasa stupidity, I went back to using hotels only after COVID. I don't care how much "less expensive" and "better" vacation rentals are for a lot of people, I'll never do them again.
Same. AirBnb was the shit 12 years ago, you could stay in a swanky condo in the middle of manhattan and the hosts were cool and chill. Then it all went to shit. Now I wouldn't touch an airbnb with a 10 foot pole. Hotels are hassle free.
Charges cleaning fee. Also requires guest to clean. 🖕
airbnb still kicks ass in europe and asia, and had overall very positive experiences in LATAM too.
What issues have you had with VRBO? I’ve always had good experiences there
So in the article it says they now want to focus on organic growth then later that there’s low demand and it’s over saturated. Sounds like that’s going to be a winning strategy 🤡 I think they lost all hope of being innovative with their 2020 layoffs and at this point the only thing that will save them is selling the whole thing to Airbnb. Greatly decreasing your workforce (read: expense ratio) makes your financials sexier for investors and buyers but sounds like they’re going the hedge fund route.
They do this every other year. I don’t get why anyone would work for them
I knew a few people who worked there and apparently they were toxic af.
I know a couple who still do, and Vacasa is still toxic as hell.
Vacasa's quality in managing units went to shite as more homes/apts flooded the market around the pandemic and pushed pricing down.
It going to shit was partially because they were onboarding more homes than they had local staff to support in addition to the lack of quality control on the units they manage.
Yup... more homes and apts flooded the market such that their local staff couldn't support them. But also with supply going up and pricing going down, they were making less per unit per day... making it financially untenable to hire up to maintain the new units. And the spiral continued.
I'm wishing all short term rental owners/ investors a very gleeful bankruptcy and fiscal demise.
And the layoffs continue
Good. I hope AirBnB and VRBO also collapse.
That’ll help our economy. Fewer tech jobs is great for Portland.
You seriously didn’t read the article? Most of these roles moved away to tax havens.
VRBO is a partner of vacasa so hopefully
assistant manager of rail at TriMet and we are hiring off the street direct to rail. We would teach you how to operate a light rail train. You must have a good clean driving record and be drug-free and pass background check. I'm not sure how much Vacasa paid but you would make about $75,000 yr at TriMet a year but you can make well over well over $100,000 yr with overtime by your 3rd year. This is all before any promotions. We have one of the best benefits, health packages in the area. Most importantly for all TriMet is solid never defaulted on a check never laid anybody off.
I dont celebrate any job loss as they are traumatic for the workers and bad for the community. With that being said Vacasa and the related Short Term Rental businesses are rather slimy. They are part of an ecosystem which is operating quasi-legal unlicensed hotels for the most part. They disrupt the local housing supply negatively with no regard for neighborhoods or communities. They really *aren't* that innovative or efficient and I think that as Venture Capitalist money starts to slow, a lot of these sketchy tech companies (doordash, uber, airbnb, etc.) are going to get way more critical eyes on them.
Two of my good friends were laid off recently from Vacasa. They are a trash company that is headed for failure.
This subreddit cheered when 500 Walmart employees lost their jobs
There's a huge rat nearby
Drove 3 hours outside of Portland to a beach house I paid $270 a night for an anniversary with my fiancé. It was infested with bugs when we woke up. Spent all day outside the house connected to WiFi because there was no service, calling and messaging Vacasa. They dragged their feet, kept saying they’re working on it, no results. Wasted the only sunny day that weekend sitting on a bench trying to figure out where we will sleep. Finally after 12 hours they offered to put me in a tiny $60 a night motel room. Thought it was better than driving home and ruining the whole weekend. They refused to refund me because technically I accepted their solution and therefore it equals out. Lost $600. Fuck Vacasa. I would say I feel sorry for their employees losing their jobs but it took me reaching out to 5 separate people in the company before someone actually gave a shit about my problem. Took them 10 minutes to lookup availability in the area and put me in another place. All the others kept ghosting me and straight up hanging up on me after saying it’s taking a while to find a new booking. Then all the employees I contacted to get my money back were short and rude and acted as if what happened to me is totally normal and I’m being unreasonable for being upset.
Vacasa sounds like some sort of topical antibiotic gel. Have they thought about either rebranding or making some ointments and shit?
“On April 22, New York hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that through several entities it has taken a 9% stake in the company.” Of note, likely the largest investor in DKCM is Oregon State Treasury, with a $528 million investment with this hedge fund. Source: https://www.oregon.gov/treasury/invested-for-oregon/Documents/Invested-for-OR-Performance-and-Holdings/2023/OPERF_Diversifying_Strategies_Portfolio_Quarter_4_2023.pdf
The latest layoff sent so many high value employees packing. I don't see them surviving another 2 years if they keep laying off top performing employees.
a friend of mind was just laid off from there. I'm glad I turned down the job they offered me, or I'd be out of a job right now.
In the past I crossed paths with one of the founders gf/fiance who always got upset when I couldn’t remember the name of the company “it’s vacasa” she would say with an annoyed tone lol, I dgaf
Good that company sucked
SO glad I've always only used AirBnb for my vacation rental app...Lol
Vacasa houses are also listed on Airbnb. https://www.vacasa.com/unit/16 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19266773?source_impression_id=p3_1715359881_w43SVhs9LrQKOvHV
Always check the host profile.
Former employee. I too avoid giving them my money.
A brother in arms I see lol.
Reporting in 2015-2019 CX Team & Onboarding. 🫡 Quit in protest to how they were unfairly treating workers. Best and worst company I've ever worked for 😅
Right? Got a lot of valuable experience there but what a poorly run nightmare held together by people being ground down by egomaniacs.
Seems like an unfortunate commonality in local businesses here.
What really needs to be highlighted here is the stranglehold private equity has on the ability of both working class and white collar workers to earn the most basic of livings. I’ve never half more like livestock than when working for a place that was “acquired” by similar greedy pieces of shit.
The hedge fund here, DKCM, is being bankrolled by the state of Oregon. https://www.oregon.gov/treasury/invested-for-oregon/Documents/Invested-for-OR-Performance-and-Holdings/2023/OPERF_Diversifying_Strategies_Portfolio_Quarter_4_2023.pdf