Vacasa Brand Guidelines: A 2009 Portland Rental Manager, a Nasdaq Listing & Casago

A booking service that turned into a manager.

Vacasa is a vacation rental management company from Portland, Oregon, owned since 2025 by the franchise company Casago. English Wikipedia says it was co-founded in 2009 by Eric Breon and the attorney Cliff Johnson, after Breon had trouble renting out his family’s vacation home in Long Beach, Washington. It provides property management services: in place of a marketplace that lists homes run by others, it looks after the homes itself, and its software, the same article says, schedules cleans and tracks maintenance tickets for its local teams.

In a 2017 interview with the trade publication VRM Intel, the founders said the business began as a booking service, and that they soon decided it could not give guests the experience they wanted without managing the homes as well. Breon described the early territory as “any market we could drive to from Portland,” naming the Oregon Coast, Sunriver and Mount Hood. A homeowner on the coast then asked the company to look after a second house in Truckee, in California; the launch there, he said, became the model for many later markets.

The founders told VRM Intel the company was bootstrapped in its first years, and English Wikipedia dates its first outside funding to 2016. Growth rankings followed: in 2014 Vacasa topped the Portland Business Journal’s list of fast-growing private companies and was ninth on the Inc. 5000 list, and in 2016 it appeared on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, English Wikipedia records.

Its home base grew with it. In March 2018 Vacasa said it would expand its Portland office into a newly built building in the Pearl District, with room for about 400 more staff, and English Wikipedia lists local honours including the Technology Association of Oregon’s Most Disruptive Technology of the Year award in 2016 and a Growth Stage Company Award at the 2018 Tom Holce Entrepreneurship Awards. Before the sale, the same article put its portfolio at more than 35,000 vacation rentals in North America, Belize and Costa Rica, across 34 US states.

Acquisitions, a listing and an app for owners.

Vacasa grew by buying other managers. English Wikipedia lists Oasis Collections, previously part-owned by Hyatt, in October 2018; Wyndham Vacation Rentals, bought from Wyndham Destinations in 2019; and TurnKey Vacation Rentals, completed on 1 April 2021, which it says added more than 6,000 US properties. The same source says that in 2018 Vacasa became the largest vacation rental management company in North America, overtaking Wyndham Vacation Rentals.

It also built outward from management. English Wikipedia says it launched Vacasa Real Estate in July 2018 to help people buy and sell vacation homes, added community-association services in 2018 and an interior design service for owners and developers in 2019, and in 2019 began showing its rental homes directly in Google search results. Its software, the article says, includes a field app for local teams and, from November 2021, the Vacasa Homeowner app, which shows owners how their homes are performing.

Vacasa became a public company on the Nasdaq on 7 December 2021, through a merger with TPG Pace Solutions, a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by TPG. Breon had stepped down as chief executive in February 2020; Matt Roberts, a former chief executive of OpenTable, followed him, and in August 2022 the company named Rob Greyber, a former Expedia executive, as Roberts’s successor, English Wikipedia says.

Platforms and managers.

Holiday rental companies fall into two broad groups: marketplaces, which list homes run by others, and managers, which run the homes themselves. Vacasa, which English Wikipedia describes as a vacation rental management company, and Sonder, which leased and operated its own apartments, belong to the second group. A manager answers to owners or landlords as well as to guests, and Vacasa built a separate app for the owners whose homes it looked after, according to the same source.

Search and listing pages carry much of this work. In 2019 Vacasa began showing its rental homes directly in Google search results, English Wikipedia says, and in July 2026, ShortTermRentalz reported, TravelAI relaunched Sonder.com as a booking site whose listings would be selected for design, location and quality. In a 2020 profile, Surface magazine illustrated Sonder with photographs of its interiors in Philadelphia, Savannah and Montreal, and quoted its founder on celebrating “architecture and the arts.”

Naming follows ownership. When Marriott International signed its licensing agreement with Sonder in August 2024, the portfolio was to join its system as a collection called “Sonder by Marriott Bonvoy.” In 2026 the operator Prism opened former Sonder buildings in the United States under its Belvilla brand, as Belvilla District 6, and Casago’s franchisees trade under place names such as Casago San Diego and Casago Belize, ShortTermRentalz reported.

Apps sit at the centre of the guest’s stay. Surface described Sonder guests receiving an access code and concierge services through an app in place of a front desk. This guide sets out each company’s founding, owners, listings and sales as dated facts, and marks clearly what rests only on a company’s own word.

One company, then many local operators.

The listing did not last. Casago, a vacation rental franchise company that Steve Schwab founded in Rocky Point, Mexico, in 2001, completed its purchase of Vacasa at the turn of April and May 2025: ShortTermRentalz reported on 2 May 2025 that the deal closed on 30 April, after Vacasa’s stockholders approved it on 29 April, while the publication’s later reports and English Wikipedia give 1 May. Vacasa’s shares stopped trading on the Nasdaq, and the combined group then managed more than 40,000 vacation rentals across North America, Belize, Costa Rica and the Caribbean, ShortTermRentalz reported.

Casago then handed Vacasa’s territory over market by market. Its model puts independent local owners in charge of each destination, using the company’s technology and central resources, and in August 2026 ShortTermRentalz reported that it had completed the sale of all former Vacasa markets, with the last handovers due in September. Former Vacasa homes went to Casago franchisees such as Casago San Diego, and Casago Belize, launched in July 2026 after the purchase of Vacasa Belize Ltd; and to larger operators such as Avari, an independently run Casago franchisee that launched in September 2026 with more than 5,500 homes in 24 former Vacasa markets. Earlier, in November 2025, Evolve had bought Guestworks, a management service run by Vacasa, in an asset purchase. In October 2026 Joe Riley succeeded Schwab as Casago’s chief executive, with Schwab staying on as chairman. In Maine, English Wikipedia says, Vacasa’s homes are now run by Tides to Pines, a Casago franchise.

For a design guide, Vacasa shows how a property manager’s brand has to speak to owners as well as guests, and how its markets can pass to new local operators. Compare Vrbo, the vacation rental marketplace, and Sonder, another American rental operator that went public in the same period. For this guide we use a deep pine green and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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