Patrick Clark wrote a great article in Bloomberg about how hosts pivoting to rural markets helped save AirBNB and other businesses in the short term rental industry from complete disaster during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Below is an excerpt, click here to read the full article:

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.”

The shifting geography of Iloulian’s business helped save his year. It also saved Airbnb, the short-term rental platform that most of his clients rely on for many of their customers…