Eric Breon spent nearly a dozen years building one vacation rental management business.

So why would he want to start again from scratch, launching a new company Tuesday in the same industry? It’s because he believes he’s come up with a better plan.

“I think I know the answer now,” Breon says.

His last startup was, momentarily, the most valuable young Portland company in generations.

Vacasa raised nearly $970 million for its business, managing vacation rental homes across the country. In 2021, when the company’s stock began trading on Wall Street investors valued Vacasa at $4 billion – anticipating it could remake a fragmented industry and capitalize on vacation travel in the post-pandemic era.

That didn’t work out.

Managing vacation rentals proved far more expensive than Vacasa anticipated and its sales plunged as travel patterns changed and the company struggled to add vacation properties. Vacasa is worth under $100 million today – less than 3% of its peak value.

Breon stepped down as Vacasa’s CEO in 2020, about two years before its stock offering, and left the company’s board last year.

While declining to talk about what went wrong at Vacasa, specifically, Breon said he thinks he has a smarter way to manage vacation rentals than his old business does.

His new Portland company is called Fairly. Like Vacasa, it offers to help property owners manage their vacation rentals in places like Sunriver and Oceanside or similar getaway destinations in other states. Fairly provides cleaning services and local advice on marketing the properties.

But while Vacasa sought to manage the rentals itself, with management operations in hundreds of vacation communities from Oregon to Maine, Fairly takes a far less ambitious approach.

The new company simply connects property owners to local cleaning personnel and real estate agents who can provide management guidance. Fairly’s technology enables property owners to communicate with these contractors and with the people renting their homes. Property owners can choose from Fairly contractors in their local markets and switch contractors if the quality of work is poor.

The goal is to enable personal communication rather than to scale up as a big business with many offices.

“The individual, day-to-day operations don’t really scale well,” Breon said. He said properties that are better cared for can charge higher rents than those that receive poor online reviews.

Fairly retains 20% of a property’s rent, half of which goes to its local contractors. Those cleaning a property or advising the rental’s owner each take 5% of the rent.

While Breon lives in White Salmon, Washington, Fairly’s headquarters are in the Kiln coworking space in Southeast Portland. The startup has 10 people working there and another 15 working remotely. Breon said he’s typically in the Portland office once a week.

Fairly helps manage properties listed for rental on other websites, including VRBO, Airbnb and even Vacasa. But Breon said Fairly will list rental properties on its own website eventually.

Fairly says it has raised $10.1 million, mostly from Breon himself, with other employees kicking in smaller sums. It has been testing its platform to manage about 50 properties Breon owns himself, building a network of 1,000 local contractors.

“Everything’s working as planned so now we’re broadly launching it,” Breon said. “We’re launching throughout the U.S.”