This is a fascinating interview with John Andrew Entwistle, the founder of vacation rental company Wander. The way to understand Wander is that it is a vertically integrated travel company. So unlike Airbnb, for example, Wander owns all of their real estate (vacation homes in top destinations), they property manage, they asset manage, and they are building out the technology required to connect all of this stuff.

They have also created what they are calling the first ever vacation rental REIT, which means that you can buy a piece of their real estate portfolio (currently 13 properties). In addition to being a source of cash, this creates an interesting flywheel effect where maybe you stay in a Wander and then decide to become an investor in their REIT, or vice versa.

Eventually though, Wander hopes to be just as asset light as Airbnb (which again, doesn't own any real estate; they're a booking platform). The idea is that REIT unit holders will ultimately own the real estate and they will be the asset manager / technology platform that sits on top. But that they will still control the entire travel experience.

John also gets into some of the specifics of how they run their business. For example, in each destination, they hire local cleaning crews and handy people (who are not Wander employees). They typically spend about 7% of the value of a property to furnish it (which is typically around $80-150k per property right now). And their average order size is around $4.5k, which suggests that people are willing to pay a premium for this vertically integrated travel experience.

If you can't see the video above, click here.

I was recently a guest on Aaron Cameron and Adam Powadiuk's Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Podcast. This is a podcast that they have been doing since 2016 (and it's "powered" by First National Financial). In this episode, we spoke about making development projects work in this current environment, as well as a bunch of other things. If you'd like to have a listen, click here. It's about 53 minutes.

Thanks for having me on your podcast, Aaron and Adam.

This an interesting discussion about Adam Neumann's new startup Flow (which I recently wrote about here).

More specifically though, the discussion is about venture capital firms backing "failed" entrepreneurs, and whether or not Flow can really be that much more valuable than your typical apartment REIT.

In its simplest form, Flow might just end up being an apartment company with a strong national brand and a consistent resident experience. But maybe that's all it needs to be.

If the link doesn't already do it for you, jump to the 7:19 mark to start with this discussion. After Flow, the podcast moves on to housing policy in the Bay Area, Houston, and Miami. So you may also want to stick around for that.

Thank you Ocean Jangda for sending this over.