Revolution of the Spanish Airbnb: 75% of Spain-Holiday.com sold

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

President Claus Sorensen sells equal packages of 25% to the current CEO of the portal and to two Danish online business entrepreneurs. US groups have bid to the end to buy the vacation rental platform.

It was 2002, and the Danish entrepreneur Claus Sorensen, then thirty years old, created a Spanish market exclusive Airbnb type service in Malaga, and he did it six years before the Airbnb itself was born and a decade before it arrived in Spain in 2012. He founded the Spain-Holiday.com portal to connect Spanish homeowners and European tourists who wanted to rent them for short trips.

Sorensen created the company alone and so far had followed. During these 17 years that have already passed, it has remained as a sole shareholder through the Danish company APS—and previously through the unmistakably Claus Sorensen Holding Group. Until now.

Sorensen overturns the company's shareholding and sells 75% of the capital of the online platform in a three-way operation. The Founder and President of Spain-Holiday will keep a package of 25% and sell three equal shares of 25% each, according to El Independiente confirms the president of the group.

The buyers are the current CEO of the company, Jannich Friis Petersen, and two Danish entrepreneurs with extensive experience in creating online businesses, Jan Dal Lahrmann and Kenneth Andersen. . The amount of the transaction is not known and is protected by a confidentiality agreement between the parties.

"We needed to give a more strategic boost to the activity of Spain-Holiday.com in the coming years. With the incorporation of the new partners we will be able to reinforce the value of the brand in Spain and we will be able to choose to develop a more ambitious expansion plan," explains Sorensen.

Spain-Holiday.com started in 2002 with an offer of only 100 houses and, sixteen years later, now announces more than 18,000 homes located only in Spain (mainly on the Mediterranean coast and on the islands). The objective of the new strategic plan is to almost triple the current offer and reach 50,000 ads in Spain in the next three years. Their figures, however, are still far from those of the giants of the sector: Airbnb exceeds the 200,000 accommodations announced in the Spanish market, for example.

"Seeing how Spain-Holiday has managed to become a solid brand in the sector, with a web traffic in continuous growth, I had the impression that we could do much more," explains Sorensen. Then the executive decided to contact the successful entrepreneurs in his country - linked to the portal of major ads for automobiles in Denmark, and who has ended up buying eBay - and finally decided to share shares with them instead of selling the company.

"I had already received several offers to buy the entire company, but the possibility of keeping 25% of it was a strong motivation to allow the entry of these three new partners," says Sorensen. According to financial sources, several American groups have been tempting until the last moment the founder of Spain-Holiday.com to take control of the portal.

The management of the group will go from being entirely in the hands of Sorensen to distribute the control between four partners in equal parts. "When you go from having 100% to having 25% of a company you must be 110% sure that the people with whom you are sharing what was previously entirely yours are on the same wavelength as you and that the chemistry is good," says Sorensen. "After 17 years with Spain-Holiday.com I have come across an important extra dose of energy with this change. These new partners come loaded with energy, good ideas and new airs."

The company, which after the operation will maintain its headquarters in Malaga, recorded revenues of 2.2 million euros last year, 11% more than in the previous year; and obtained a net profit of 309,000 euros, triple that of the previous year. Sorensen does not advance the financial objectives for the next few years, and is protected by an unspecified aspiration to "continue with a constant growth in billing and profits" in the coming years.

Until a couple of years ago, the business model of Spain-Holiday.com was based exclusively on the payment of a fixed annual subscription to the owners to advertise their homes, regardless of how many times and how much they rented their homes. The standard fee is 245 euros.

But since the beginning of 2017 the portal has added to the growing trend in the sector to give the possibility to its users to pay a commission for each reservation made, which in its case is 15% rental amount and paid by the owner only of the apartment (no surcharge applies to guests). This last option is still a minority among the portal's clients, but it is growing strongly in the last two years.

"Most of the holiday rental companies have been focusing on global growth while we have kept the focus on Spain. I think it was and still is a wise decision. I decided to be an expert in holiday rentals in Spain, because we already know that a lot of people do not have much pressure," says the President of Spain-Holiday.com.

The entry of new partners serves to open the door to a radical change in strategy in the medium term. And it is that Sorensen, firm defender until now of centering all his activity of tourist rent in Spain, admits that will study in the future expand the business to "other geographic zones".

This article was written and published in Spanish and has been translated into English via Google Translate. Click here to read the original article.

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