Guest Experience
Matt Kowalewski
I’m thrilled to announce our newest operated property, Wander Malibu Beach. This is a $10M beachfront 2 bedroom 2.5 bath house, just minutes from Nobu Malibu and Malibu Pier. We anticipate setting up and launching the property in July. Wander Operated has shown promising momentum in June, with multiple homes in regions like Sonoma, Florida Keys, Maine, and upstate NY under discussion. We have also expanded the sales team for Operated, with our first rep already started, look forward to his official intro in the next update.
Our home operations team set up our 15th Wander property, Wander Anchor Cove, in just two short weeks! Among other things, the team implemented numerous improvements, such as new railings, fire pits, smart home tech, and a built-out bunk room. We aim to go live with these new changes in early July. The team has also commenced the transformation of our first operated property, Wander Big Sur Coast. The plan includes a comprehensive property makeover, complete with a custom-built gym, movie room, poker room, and guest house, all set to be completed in just 11 days.
Our guest experience team dedicated the month to enhancing our NOI while maintaining quality control across all properties for the summer season. On the NOI front, we’ve made optimizations at locations such as Vail and Hudson Valley, resulting in 20% savings on cleaning and maintenance costs. Great job, team!
The procurement team has spent June ensuring the arrival of all furnishings and upgrades to our upcoming homes. We’ve also partnered with Bryte Mattresses to enhance the guest experience further. Starting with our new properties, we will incorporate Bryte’s technologically advanced mattresses, which heat, cool, and automatically adjust firmness, into our hospitality program.
Finance
David Molotsky
We are pleased to announce that our partners at Baird have gone to market with Wander’s first PropCo which we expect will be an important additional source of dedicated real-estate capital. We have also made progress on the Reg A offering materials for the Wander Atlas REIT which we expect to file with the SEC in early August. In the meantime, the REIT’s operating partnership just added its sixth home. The metrics across all REIT properties remain strong and consistent with those of our other Wander properties described above.
During June the Finance organization was also very focused on building out the process to scale Operated and optimize related unit economics. Along these lines, the team established the buy-box and target asset profile for Operated and built-out revenue estimator tooling to further streamline the expansion of this new supply channel.
Within Finance more broadly, we finalized the Audit of Wander.com, finalized the internal control review of the REIT, and made significant progress on the REIT audit. We also successfully closed on Anchor Cove. We also conducted an enhanced analysis of existing portfolio performance, investment case studies, and investment thesis rationale to enhance our current acquisition process and to support the launch of our dedicated real-estate joint venture marketing process with Baird.
Cross Team
Zach McNelis
Every initiative in June was directly tied to scaling Operated and everyone jumped in, taking on initiatives regardless of their role. Our Acquisition team partnered with the concierge team to source properties and the associated owner information so our newly defined sales team could start contacting homeowners. We’re actively working to refine our Initial Property Profile to deploy targeted books of business to our initial sales team. Finance, Data, and Product teams collaborated to ensure WanderOS could seamlessly support property-level expenses for the anticipated influx of Operated assets, streamlining expense reconciliation. The HomeOps and Procurement teams implemented processes to identify and quickly procure all of the materials needed for each of the Operated properties so we can reduce the time to booking of these properties, bringing them online as quickly and efficiently as possible. Marketing and Product working in coordination with the Operated GTM team to get the Operated owner-landing page and product video launched, all while launching the listing pages for Big Sur. There is still a lot of work to accomplish across the company and cross-functional execution will continue to be a key to success. June was a great start and I’m very confident it will only get stronger as we dig deeper together.
Conclusion
As a Founder, I am necessarily focused on any potential clouds on the horizon and on ways to de-risk Wander’s success. As I look toward the future there are, of course, many more challenges ahead and opportunities to seize. Given this round closing, strong metrics, and further supply unlock, I feel more than ever that as long as we continue to execute it is more likely than not that Wander can become a truly important company…which is exactly what we plan to do.