Our history

There had to be a better way

In 2012, MyVR co-founders Jonathan Murray and Michael Stachowiak were lamenting how difficult it was to manage their vacation rental properties while working full-time jobs. While there appeared to be dozens of legacy software solutions for larger professional property managers, they saw nothing targeting the small property manager or individual owner — and among those legacy solutions, nothing that seemed modern or easy-to-use. Having just successfully sold their prior startup, Jon and Mike teamed up with Markus Nordvik and agreed to commit the next phase of their lives to solving this challenging problem.

A study around the same time (by Global Radius Market Research) showed that about half of all professional property managers in the U.S. fit into this category: Too big to operate well without software but too small to make the clunky legacy solutions geared toward large PMs work. In fact, the study showed that almost two-thirds of small property managers didn’t yet use software and almost half of them didn’t even have a bookable website! This was in addition to the 57 percent of the U.S. vacation rental market that was rented directly by owners — virtually none of whom used software to manage their business. Very few even had their own property websites!

The MyVR team saw this lack of technological tools to be a real problem, particularly for a $100 billion industry that seemed to be on the verge of explosive growth. It seemed then that the need for software was only going to increase: The days of activities like faxing contracts, depositing paper checks, sending emails manually to inquiries and renters (across multiple distribution channels) were over. As vacation rentals continued to go mainstream, competition increased, distribution channels expanded, and bookings and payments moved from almost entirely offline to almost entire online. Software would become a necessity.

In 2021, MyVR was acquired by Guesty and continues to operate independently.

Our approach

Solving a big problem takes fresh perspective

MyVR is on a mission to build the most robust and easy-to-use software available to vacation rental owners and property managers. More than that, our goal is to build a powerful open platform for the alternative accommodations industry.

We're focused on building robust and powerful software for owners and property managers. Our open platform approach also opens the platform to outside developers and service providers who can build on top of our platform.

This helps ensure our customers will always have access to best in class products and services, connected to the software they use to run their business.

This is a huge win for owners and property managers — they’re no longer stuck with archaic, legacy solutions with proprietary, vertically integrated systems that box people in, and hold their data hostage, and limit the choice of features and functionality.

As our developer community continues to grow, customers will increasingly have access to great technology solutions and services without ever needing to change software companies.