Gives more insight into why they went for VC funding vs. public.

““It’s pretty tough to obtain capital right now, but it’s the opposite if you have a company that has strong earnings. I’ve never seen so much competition for financing,” said CEO Brian Sharples said.”

Other travel agencies out there work with smaller property management companies. The biggest problem faced is that there is no standardized software in the travel industry and trying to see availability of all properties becomes an extremely tough chore…leaving the telephone the most reliable technology to see real-time availability information.

I believe that Homeaway is probably getting the framework setup to be able to see everyone’s availability for free, then at some point they will offer a premium service that people will subscribe to where they will take bookings for individual owners. It’s sort of like a “Global Property Management” system.

The key to all of this the software…either programming it yourself or acquiring someone that already has it, then scaling it to be big.

SummitCove Software Solutions, grown from SummitCove.com has created it’s own scalable software system for property managers to use. At the same time, a higher entity can see real-time availability information from multiple property management companies and book properties in all areas where their free software is already deployed.

Cool stuff…

“Vacation home rental site HomeAway announced Tuesday it received a substantial $250 million fourth round of funding.

HomeAway, which has raised $405 million to date in private equity, received its latest round from lead investor Technology Crossover Ventures, along with existing investors Institutional Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures.

HomeAway’s $250 million third round represents the largest U.S. venture stake for an Internet company over the past eight years, according to Venture Source.

Companies that tend to raise sizable venture rounds in excess of $100 million tend to be in capital intensive industries, such as networking company Santera Systems and telecommunications company Vonage, compared with Internet companies that require less capital to operate–and hence have comparatively smaller funding rounds.

HomeAway plans to use the proceeds from its latest round to make additional strategic investments, as well as eliminate all its debt and bolster its marketing efforts.

Over its brief three-year history, the company has grown through acquisitions of other vacation rental sites such as CyberRentals.com in the U.S., Holiday-Rentals.co.uk in the United Kingdom, and Germany’s FeWo-direkt.de.

“We are very pleased to secure this major round of funding, particularly during the current financial crisis that is increasingly restricting access to capital for many companies,”" Brian Sharples, HomeAway’s CEO, said in a statement.”