Big news in the vacation rental industry. Yesterday Home Away announced another large round of financing. They raised an additional $250M. Techcrunch released a blog entitled “Monster Round For HomeAway: $250 Million, At An Absurd Valuation“. Below is the post, please click through to read the comments.

Austin, Texas based HomeAway, a vacation home rental service, has raised a $250 million round of financing. This comes on top of $209 million previously raised over two rounds.

The new financing was led by Technology Crossover Ventures, with existing investors IVP and Redpoint Ventures participating as well. The financing is the largest minority investment of a U.S. Internet company in the last eight years, according to Venture Source.

The pre-money valuation was around $1.15 billion, say a couple of sources, and at least $50 million of the round went off the table to earlier investors. The company was founded in 2005 and has grown primarily through acquisitions: They’ve acquired at least eleven vacation home rental sites, including VRBO, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr and OwnersDirect.co.uk.

The company has revenues of around $150 million and $50 million in ebitda. In addition to cashing out some of the investors, our guess is that the additional funding will likely be used for further acquisitions.

It’s also clear that the round was seriously overvalued. Ebay was rumored to have mulled over an acquisition earlier this year at $1.5 billion, but it never came through with a firm offer. It’s not clear who else could be a buyer at this valuation. Also, since HomeAway has acquired just about everyone in the market, there’s little room for
additional growth via acquisitions. 20x ebitda is a public company valuation for a company with real growth potential. Our guess is these new investors may take a bath.

What does this mean to the industry? Time will tell but my guess is they have a few things in mind:

1. Online booking tool/service for RBOs (Rent by owners). Either they will build it (or it’s built) or they will buy someone that is doing it well.

2. Make a bigger push into the property management segment of the industry.

3. Rollout premium services for existing clients, one of which might include an advertising engine for RBOs that currently just post their property profiles.