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.

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I was reading about Wander last night before bed. For those of you who aren't familiar, they are a startup that is building a network of smart homes around the world so that people can live and work remotely. You rent these homes like you would a home on Airbnb, but the difference here is that Wander owns all of the homes and is working to create a very unique and consistent kind of experience. They also offer a membership that costs $200 per year and gives you benefits like discounts on bookings and early access to new properties. So far the company has raised $27 million to help build out this vision.

This is all very interesting to me because I think it's a great idea, and because 20 some years ago I wrote a business plan with a friend of mine that was almost identical to this. We were both still in undergrad and we had this hypothesis that a lot of people would love to find a way to live as citizens of the world. We obviously never did anything with that plan, but in looking back we were probably too early, even if we were right about people's latent desires. Today, things feel very different. I think there's little doubt that knowledge working has become more flexible. So I suspect we will see a lot more of these kinds of ideas going forward.