Home Team Luxury Rentals Named One of America’s Fastest-Growing Vacation Rental Management Companies by AirDNA
AirDNA has named Home Team Luxury Rentals one of the fastest-growing vacation rental management companies in the United States, ranking the company #4 nationally for growth in its 2026 Best Property Managers rankings.
Home Team recorded 70% year-over-year growth in active listings from 2025 to 2026, according to AirDNA. Growth alone, however, did not determine which companies qualified. For its Fastest Growing category, AirDNA considered managers with more than 100 active listings in both years and required their guest ratings to have improved over the same period.
For us, that second measurement provides important context for the first. Adding properties is one measure of growth. Building an organization capable of taking on more homes, homeowners and guests while continuing to improve the guest experience is a more meaningful measure of how that organization is developing.
AirDNA’s Rankings Put Growth in Context
AirDNA’s broader analysis shows why maintaining quality at scale is difficult in vacation rental management.
According to AirDNA, more than half of U.S. hosts with a single listing maintain a guest rating of 4.9 or higher. Among managers with 20 to 49 listings, approximately one in five does. Once a portfolio exceeds 500 listings, AirDNA found that only 0.6% of operators maintain a rating of 4.9 or higher.
Average ratings follow a similar pattern. AirDNA found that the typical single-listing host has a rating of approximately 4.86, compared with approximately 4.65 among operators managing 250 or more listings.
There are understandable reasons for that decline. A larger portfolio creates more opportunities for inconsistency. More properties mean more arrivals and departures, cleaning turns, maintenance needs, guest conversations, pricing decisions and homeowner relationships. As the portfolio becomes larger, the organization supporting it has to become more capable as well.
AirDNA’s Fastest Growing ranking recognizes companies that managed that transition particularly well over the past year.
| Rank | Vacation Rental Manager | Listing Growth, 2025–2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bach Bros Properties | +94% |
| 2 | Stonybrook Cabins | +76% |
| 3 | Compass Vacation Properties | +72% |
| 4 | Home Team Vacation Rentals | +70% |
| 5 | Host And Home | +67% |
These are impressive growth rates throughout the group, particularly given AirDNA’s requirement that guest ratings also improve. Every company represented here deserves recognition for accomplishing both at the same time.
AirDNA lists us as Home Team Vacation Rentals, the name under which much of this growth occurred. Today, the company operates as Home Team Luxury Rentals, reflecting an intentional decision to focus exclusively on luxury vacation homes.
Scaling an Independent Luxury Vacation Rental Company
There is another aspect of this recognition that I think is worth discussing: the kind of company we are trying to build.
Home Team remains an independently owned vacation rental management company while expanding across vacation markets throughout the United States. At the same time, we have chosen to specialize rather than broaden our portfolio. Home Team is dedicated exclusively to luxury vacation homes.
That combination creates an interesting operating challenge.
Luxury vacation rentals aren't uniform products. A mountain cabin in Blue Ridge may serve a very different guest and type of trip than a large coastal home in Florida or a luxury property in Arizona. The amenities that influence demand can be different. Seasonality is different. The competitive set is different. Even the reasons guests choose the destination can be different.
The property itself also plays a larger role in the vacation experience.
Guests choosing a luxury vacation home may select it specifically for its pool, views, waterfront access, entertainment spaces, privacy, architecture, location or ability to accommodate a large group. The home isn't simply where the guest stays while visiting a destination. In many cases, it is an important part of the destination experience itself.
That creates expectations around presentation, cleanliness, amenities, communication, and property condition.
Homeowners have equally important expectations. They are entrusting us with valuable real estate assets and expect their management company to understand pricing, distribution, marketing, property positioning, and local market dynamics in addition to the operational side of hospitality.
Our challenge, therefore, isn't simply to make the same operating model larger. We have to develop infrastructure that can scale while remaining responsive to the individual properties, homeowners, and markets we manage.
What 70% Growth Requires Behind the Scenes
The 70% growth AirDNA measured represents considerably more than an increase in the number of listings under management.
Every additional property creates work across revenue management, marketing, distribution, onboarding, guest communication, housekeeping, maintenance, property care, and homeowner communication. Expanding into additional markets introduces another layer of local knowledge and operational complexity.
Much of our work has therefore focused on building the organization behind the portfolio.
That means developing strong capabilities within individual markets while also creating technology, revenue management, marketing, and support functions that can work across the organization.
This is part of the thinking behind Rise Collective.
Home Team doesn't grow in isolation. It is supported by a broader organization designed to develop the people, technology, systems, and specialized capabilities necessary to build and operate hospitality businesses at scale.
The objective isn't to make every property or market operate identically. In luxury hospitality, that would often work against what makes an individual home valuable in the first place.
Instead, we want the infrastructure underneath the experience to become more capable as the portfolio grows, allowing our teams to preserve the characteristics of individual homes and markets while benefiting from the resources of a larger organization.
Home Team's growth is one indication of what that infrastructure can enable. The improvement in guest ratings is an equally important indication of whether that infrastructure is developing in the right direction.
An Independent Measure of Our Progress
One reason I value the AirDNA recognition is the way the rankings are constructed.
AirDNA states that property managers don't apply for its Best Property Managers ranking and cannot pay their way onto the list. Instead, the company analyzes professional managers using its own vacation rental marketplace data.
That makes the result useful as an external benchmark.
A company can measure its own growth in many ways. Independent data provides another perspective on how that performance compares with the broader industry.
In this case, AirDNA identified Home Team among a small group of managers that combined substantial portfolio expansion with improving guest ratings.
For homeowners, I think those two measurements belong together.
Growth can demonstrate that an organization is attracting additional properties and homeowners. Guest experience provides another indication of whether the company's operating capabilities are developing alongside that growth.
Neither measure tells the entire story of a management company. Together, however, they tell us considerably more than growth alone.
A Period of Recognition Across Home Team and Rise Collective
The AirDNA ranking comes during a period in which the work happening across Home Team and Rise Collective has received recognition from several independent organizations.
Rise Collective was recently named a finalist for the 16th Annual GrowFL Florida Companies to Watch Awards, a statewide program recognizing growing second-stage companies contributing to Florida's economy. More than 500 companies were nominated for the 2026 awards, with 95 advancing as finalists. GrowFL is expected to name 50 Companies to Watch honorees in October.
I was also honored to be named to the Tampa Bay Business Journal's 2026 40 Under 40, which recognizes emerging business leaders across the Tampa Bay region.
I'm grateful for that recognition, but I view these three acknowledgments as measures of different things.
GrowFL is looking at the development of Rise Collective as a company. The Tampa Bay Business Journal recognition focuses on individual leadership. AirDNA's analysis is specific to Home Team's performance as a vacation rental manager.
Together, they provide three independent perspectives on different parts of what our team has been building.
Of those measurements, the AirDNA data gives us a particularly tangible operating benchmark: Home Team grew its active vacation rental portfolio by 70% in a year while simultaneously improving its guest rating.
What Comes Next
We are proud of 70% year-over-year growth, but our objective isn't growth for its own sake.
We are building Home Team around the idea that an independently owned company can operate a national portfolio of exceptional luxury vacation homes while retaining the specialization and attention those properties require.
That remains a work in progress. There are systems to improve, markets to develop and plenty that we will learn as the organization continues to grow.
The recent recognition from AirDNA, GrowFL and the Tampa Bay Business Journal gives us several useful external benchmarks along that path. We're grateful for all three, while recognizing that the most important measures of what we're building will continue to be the experiences we create for our homeowners and guests and the organization we create for the people doing that work.
The credit for Home Team's growth belongs to people throughout Home Team and Rise Collective: the teams bringing new homeowners into the company and onboarding their properties; the local and operational teams caring for homes; the guest teams managing thousands of interactions; the revenue and marketing teams working to improve property performance; and the technology and support teams building the infrastructure underneath it all.
It also belongs to the homeowners who have trusted us with their properties.
That trust is what makes the growth possible. Our responsibility is to continue earning it as we grow.
We're grateful to AirDNA for the recognition, and proud of the entire Home Team and Rise Collective team that earned it.
—
Elliott Caldwell
Co-Founder & CEO, Rise Collective
