Airbnb Salvaged Its IPO by Mastering the Pandemic Pivot
The company’s ability to adapt to Covid—and meet customers where they wanted to go—may have saved its stock market launch.
Jeff Iloulian runs a property management firm in addition to HostGPO, a company that caters to hosts of vacation rentals. “The demand moved around, it didn’t vanish,” he says.
Photographer: Damon Casarez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Jeff Iloulian braced for his business to crash when the Covid-19 pandemic set in this spring. Iloulian runs HostGPO, a company that helps owners who rent property through Airbnb and similar platforms negotiate discounts on household products and furnishings. His clients suddenly had so few guests in lucrative urban markets that some hired movers to haul furniture from downtown apartments to nearby warehouses.
This would have been a disaster for HostGPO, except that those same property managers were doing big business in rural markets, and they began hunting for real estate in places not known as vacation hotbeds: Lake Arrowhead in addition to Lake Tahoe, eastern Pennsylvania as well as the Hamptons. “People are buying expensive furniture in the Poconos right now,” says Iloulian. “The demand moved around, it didn’t vanish.”