For Vacasa CEO Matt Roberts, who had the same title at OpenTable when he sold it to Booking Holdings eight years ago, focusing on adding homes and building income for owners will work as a hedge against Google and other competitors just as adding restaurants, he argued, worked at the dining reservations platform.

Running property management platform Vacasa, which went public in December, amounts to a sort of ground hog day all over again for Roberts. He took the top spot two years ago at Vacasa, replacing founder Eric Breon, who remains a board member.

Roberts told Skift a day after Vacasa reported its first financials last week as a public company — it lost $154 million in 2021 — that the property manager is focusing on building a supply-centric business with the infrastructure to accelerate returns.

If a property manager is increasing its supply — and Vacasa counts 37,000 in its portfolio — and has exclusive rights to control their calendars, then it is less beholden to the demand side of the business, and the need to look to Google for customer acquisition, he said.

When he joined OpenTable as its chief financial officer in 2005, obtaining the “next million diners” was a milestone Roberts said. “When I left that was a bad Wednesday,” he said. “But the growth was enabled completely by a supply focus by building out the infrastructure that solved a real problem.”

By the time Roberts relinquished the CEO post in 2015, OpenTable had a wide lead in the dining reservations market in North America.

Today, Vacasa, which withdrew from much of Europe and South America to focus on North America after Roberts came aboard in 2020, is the only really nationwide player in the U.S. after it grew by acquiring Wyndham’s vacation rental business in North America, as well as buying Turnkey, and a bevy of smaller property managers in the past few years.

Roberts said Vacasa’s tech and value proposition is creating new supply, adding that 20 percent of sales came from owners who had never rented out their properties before.

Roberts knows that competitors will be gunning for Vacasa, but he argued that Vacasa has a “defensible position” because of its supply, and ability to solve hard problems at scale. Execution is not cheap, he added.

“Everybody underestimates how hard everybody’s business is to do,” Roberts said, arguing that Vacasa built its own, comprehensive and integrated tech plaform, and that others use solutions that target specific pain points, but don’t combine the same levels of data and are piecemeal.

One vacation rental product expert scoffed at the alleged superiority of Vacasa’s tech, and added that “any professional manager has fully integrated systems these days.”