Fight over vacation rental management breaks out as Meredith Lodging sues Vacasa over “smear campaign”

By MIKE ROGOWAY/The Oregonian

A small rival filed a complaint against Portland vacation rental management giant Vacasa on Wednesday, alleging that Vacasa had embarked on a “smear campaign” in an effort to poach clients.

The court case spotlights the intense dynamics underlying the market for managing vacation getaways. Privately held Vacasa has grown enormously since its founding in 2009, primarily by acquiring small management companies in vacation destination communities and by winning clients away from other businesses.

Vacasa is one of Portland’s largest companies and one of the few sizable, Oregon-based companies to emerge in the past several decades. It manages more than 25,000 vacation rentals across the nation – and in several foreign countries – providing housekeeping, maintenance and online rental listing services.

The Portland company says it can outperform competitors by using technology to dynamically adjust rental prices for busy periods, which makes rental properties more expensive for vacationers but more profitable for the homes’ owners.

Vacasa has raised about $630 million over the past several years, including a $108 million investment round last spring. It had 6,000 employees prior to the pandemic, most of them in vacation destination markets where local crews maintain and clean vacation homes between rentals.

Bend-based Meredith Lodging – which has office in Waldport and Lincoln City — maintains just 700 homes, in destinations along the Oregon coast and in central Oregon. In its complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Eugene, Meredith alleges that Vacasa sales representatives have been badmouthing the smaller competitor to its clients.

Meredith claims that Vacasa representatives have been cold-calling vacation property owners who contract with Meredith. The Bend company alleges that Vacasa’s representatives spread falsehoods about the cleanliness of Meredith’s properties and how it manages negative reviews, then asks them to switch to Vacasa.

“Our primary objective really is to stop Vacasa from engaging in this untoward business practice,” said Annie Robertson, Meredith’s chief legal officer. “This damages our reputation to call people and say negative things about our company.”

Meredith said it wants the court to stop Vacasa from “falsely advertising,” and to pay attorney fees and unspecified damages from lost revenue damage to the brand and other costs. Robertson said that Vacasa had inquired previously about acquiring the Bend company, but that Meredith made it clear it wasn’t interested.

Meredith asked Vacasa to stop with the cold calls before filing Wednesday’s, according to Robertson, but she said the Portland company refused. She said the dispute illustrates the issues that arise when one large business gains a big share of any market.

“We’re starting to see that with these vacation rental management companies. They’re being consolidated and rolled up into larger organizations,” Robertson said. She said Vacasa and other big players are making the vacation management business more difficult for small companies and more expensive for vacationers.

“That has an impact on competing businesses,” Robertson said, “and that has an impact on consumers.”