The oldest vacation rental management companies in America
Professional vacation rental management is not a startup-era invention. The oldest companies still renting beach cottages today opened their doors more than a century before Airbnb.
The oldest still-operating vacation rental management companies in the United States predate Airbnb by more than a century. The Knowles Company in Northeast Harbor, Maine traces its rental business to 1898, when a village librarian began finding summer cottages for visitors. Coldwell Banker Sol Needles in Cape May, New Jersey dates to 1901. Both still rent vacation homes today.
American vacation rental management grew out of beach-town and resort real estate offices that managed summer cottages for absentee owners, decades before the internet. We verified 27 companies founded before 1970 that still run rental programs in 2026. Nearly all of them sit on the Atlantic coast, and the densest clusters are North Carolina's Outer Banks and South Carolina's Grand Strand.
How we built this list
What counts, and what we checked
There is no registry of when vacation rental companies were founded, so this list is compiled from each company's own history pages, Better Business Bureau records, local newspapers, and trade press. We fetched and read every source. Where a company's claimed date could not be confirmed, we left it off rather than guess.
Inclusion criteria
- Still operating in 2026, either independently or under its original brand.
- Runs a real vacation or short-term rental management program today, not just a sales brokerage that occasionally lists a summer rental.
- A founding year we could verify from the company's own materials or a credible named secondary source.
- Founded before 1970 for the main ranking. A separate section covers the famous names that followed in the 1970s.
One honest caveat runs through the whole list: most of these companies began as real estate offices, insurance agencies, or land-development firms and added rental management as a department later. We date each one to the founding of the company and note the rental history in context. This is not a claim to be exhaustive. There are thousands of small operators, and older ones surely exist. If you run or know of one, we would genuinely like to hear about it.
The ranking
27 companies, founded 1898 to 1969
Ordered oldest first. Unit counts, where shown, are the company's own current figures.
The next wave
The names that came next, 1972 to 1980
By the 1970s the resort real estate office had become a recognized model, and the years that followed produced many of the largest independent operators still running today, including some of the most recognized names on the Outer Banks and the Gulf Coast.
The geography
The old guard is almost entirely coastal
Of the 27 companies founded before 1970, all but two are on the Atlantic seaboard. The pattern follows where American summer-resort culture took hold earliest: the barrier islands and beach towns where wealthy and middle-class families bought second cottages and needed someone local to rent and watch them. North Carolina and South Carolina together account for nearly half the list.
Two clusters stand out. The Outer Banks of North Carolina alone holds six pre-1970 companies plus the famous 1970s names (Stan White, Twiddy, Sun Realty), making it arguably the deepest concentration of long-running rental operators in the country. The South Carolina Grand Strand, from Myrtle Beach down through Surfside, Garden City, and Pawleys Island, is the other. Both are places where the rental cottage, not the hotel, defined the vacation from the start.
Why they're all real estate offices
The first vacation rental managers were brokers
There is a common thread in almost every founding story on this list, and it explains how the industry actually began. These companies were not "vacation rental companies" when they started. They were real estate brokerages, and a few were insurance agencies or land developers. The rental business was a service they added because their customers needed it.
The logic was simple. A broker sold a family a beach cottage. That family used it a few weeks a year and wanted income from it the rest of the season. The broker already had the local relationships, a storefront on the main beach road, and a reason to keep an eye on the property. Managing the rental was a natural extension of the sale. The Knowles Company is the cleanest illustration of the model in reverse: according to its own history, the business began in 1898 when a Northeast Harbor librarian started matching summer visitors with cottages, and the real estate sales came afterward.
This is why the modern distinction between "real estate" and "property management" barely existed for most of the twentieth century. Companies like Atkinson Realty, Joe Lamb Jr. & Associates, and Garden City Realty all describe the same arc: founded to sell property, grew a rental department as the second-home market matured. The detached, software-driven vacation rental manager is a recent idea. For its first hundred years, this was a local real estate function.
Where the old guard went
The roll-ups came for the long-timers
Most companies on this list are still family-owned, several into their fourth and fifth generations. But the 2010s wave of consolidation, led by Wyndham, ResortQuest, and especially Vacasa, acquired a long list of established regional operators. In several markets, the recognizable old brand name now sits on top of a national platform. A few examples of long-running operators that were absorbed:
Others followed the same path. Kaiser Realty in Gulf Shores and Sterling Resorts on the Florida Panhandle both operate under Vacasa today, and the ResortQuest brand, itself built in the late 1990s by rolling up firms like Destin's Abbott Realty, eventually passed through Wyndham to Vacasa as well. For a fuller picture of how the largest operators were assembled, see our breakdown of the largest short-term rental management companies. The takeaway for this list: longevity and independence are now two different things. The companies that have stayed family-run for 60, 80, or 120 years are a shrinking and increasingly notable group.
The oldest job in the business
Strip away the software and the marketplaces, and what these companies have done for a century is the same thing the newest operators do today: rent someone else's home, then make sure it comes back in the condition it left. Watching property condition across hundreds of turnovers is the original work of vacation rental management, and it is still where reputations are won or lost.
RapidEye is built for that part of the job. It reads the turnover photos your cleaners already take and flags damage, missed cleaning, and changes before guests ever see them, whether you manage 50 cottages or 5,000.
See how RapidEye worksCommon questions
Frequently asked
What is the oldest vacation rental management company in America?
The oldest still-operating vacation rental company we could verify is The Knowles Company in Northeast Harbor, Maine, which dates its real estate and rental business to 1898. Coldwell Banker Sol Needles in Cape May, New Jersey is close behind, with the Better Business Bureau listing its start date as March 1, 1901. Both still rent vacation homes today.
Did vacation rentals exist before Airbnb?
Yes, by more than a century. Airbnb was founded in 2008 and Vrbo in 1995, but professional vacation rental management in the United States grew out of beach-town real estate offices managing summer cottages. The oldest companies still operating, The Knowles Company (1898) and Sol Needles (1901), predate Airbnb by roughly 110 years.
How did the vacation rental industry start?
It started inside local real estate brokerages. As seaside and mountain resort towns developed, the same offices that sold cottages also managed seasonal rentals for owners who only visited part of the year. Almost every company on this list began as a real estate office, an insurance agency, or a land-development firm and added a rental department as demand grew.
Which states have the oldest vacation rental companies?
The oldest companies cluster almost entirely along the Eastern Seaboard. North Carolina's Outer Banks and South Carolina's Grand Strand are the densest clusters, followed by the New Jersey Shore, Cape Cod and the Islands, Maine's Mount Desert Island, and the Virginia and Delmarva beaches. Lake Tahoe, California and Door County, Wisconsin are the only non-Atlantic markets on the pre-1970 list.
Are these companies still independent?
Most remain family-owned, several into their third, fourth, or fifth generation. But a number of long-established operators have been absorbed by national roll-ups. Meyer Vacation Rentals (1967) was acquired by Vacasa in 2021 and Sandbridge Realty (1992) in 2022, among others.
Sources
Founding dates are drawn from each company's own history pages where available, supplemented by Better Business Bureau records, named local news coverage, and trade press. URLs are shown as plain text for verification.
- The Knowles Company, "About" ("operating a successful and professional real estate and rental business since 1898")https://knowlesco.com/about/
- Bangor Daily News, "The Knowles Company announces owner's retirement, welcomes new ownership" (2025) ("Founded in 1898")https://www.bangordailynews.com/2025/02/26/bdn-maine/the-knowles-company-announces-owners-retirement-welcomes-new-ownership/
- Better Business Bureau, Sol Needles Real Estate profile (Business Started: 3/1/1901; category "Real estate sales and rentals")https://www.bbb.org/us/nj/cape-may/profile/real-estate/sol-needles-real-estate-0221-80006537
- Better Business Bureau, Diller Fisher Realtors profile (Business Started: 5/1/1930; categories Vacation Rentals and Real Estate)https://www.bbb.org/us/nj/stone-harbor/profile/vacation-rentals/diller-fisher-realtors-0221-80005384
- Diller Fisher Realtors (homepage) (Avalon & Stone Harbor summer vacation rentals; long-running anniversary badge)https://dfrealtors.com/
- Congdon & Coleman Real Estate (homepage) ("Since 1931"; Nantucket rentals)https://www.congdonandcoleman.com/
- Allen Insurance and Financial, "L.S. Robinson of Southwest Harbor joins Allen" ("L. S. Robinson was founded in 1932 by Lawrence Robinson")https://allenif.com/l-s-robinson-of-southwest-harbor-joins-allen-insurance-and-financial-4/
- L.S. Robinson Real Estate & Vacation Rentals (200+ vacation homes; "since 1932")https://lsrobinson.com/
- Atkinson Realty Vacations, "About Us" ("full-service vacation property management company ... serving ... since 1943")https://www.atkinsonrealtyvacations.com/about-us
- Atkinson Realty, "Our Story" (founder Frank Atkinson; 1943)https://chooseatkinson.com/our-story/
- WMDT-47, "Wilgus Associates, Inc. celebrates 80th anniversary" (2025) ("Founded in 1945")https://www.wmdt.com/2025/08/wilgus-associates-inc-celebrates-80th-anniversary/
- Wilgus Associates, Vacation Rental Management (Wilgus Vacation Rentals division, Bethany Beach)https://www.wilgusassociates.com/owners/vacation-rental-management/
- Southern Shores Realty (homepage) ("Vacation Rental Management Since 1947"; 300+ homes)https://www.southernshores.com/
- Bryant Real Estate, "The History of Bryant Real Estate" ("In 1952, Annie Bryant Peterson opened Bryant Real Estate")https://www.bryantre.com/blog/misc/history-bryant-real-estate
- Elliott Beach Rentals, "About Elliott Realty" ("Elliott Realty was started in 1959 by the late Senator Dick Elliott")https://www.elliottbeachrentals.com/about-elliott-realty/
- Surfside Realty (homepage) ("since 1962")https://www.surfsiderealty.com/
- Thomas Beach Vacations, "Our History" ("Mildred Thomas started Thomas Realty in 1962"; ~420 properties)https://www.northmyrtlebeachvacations.com/thomas-vacation-history/
- Pawleys Island Realty, "Property Management" ("Since 1962 ... founded by Linwood Altman"; 200+ rentals)https://www.pawleysislandrealty.com/property-management
- Emerald Isle Realty, "About Us" ("Since 1962"; 700+ properties)https://www.emeraldislerealty.com/about-us
- Siebert Realty, "About" ("oldest and largest vacation rental company in Virginia ... since 1962")https://www.siebert-realty.com/about/about-siebert/
- Carolina Beach Realty (homepage) ("since 1963"; 150+ homes)https://www.carolinabeachrealty.net/
- Donahue Real Estate / Falmouth Vacation Rentals ("Marge Donahue, founded the company in 1963")https://www.falmouthhomes.com/agent-dt.asp?id=1
- Beach Realty & Construction / Kitty Hawk Rentals (homepage) ("originally known as Kitty Hawk Rentals ... since 1964"; 400+ rentals)https://www.beachrealtync.com/
- Golden Isles Realty (homepage) ("Proudly Serving the Golden Isles Since 1966")https://www.goldenislesrealty.com/
- Hauserman Rental Group, "About Us" ("Since 1966 ... North Lake Tahoe")https://www.enjoytahoe.com/about-us/
- Lundquist Realty, "About Us" ("Since 1966 ... Door County, WI")https://lundquistrealty.com/about-us/
- G. Anderson Agency, "About" ("began its journey in November of 1967")https://ganderson.com/about/
- Sullivan Sotheby's International Realty, Block Island (homepage) ("since 1967")https://www.sullivanbi.com/
- Joe Lamb Jr. & Associates, "Joe Lamb Realty" ("founded Joe Lamb Jr. and Associates in 1968 ... before evolving to include vacation rentals")https://www.joelambjr.com/outer-banks-real-estate/joe-lamb-realty
- Dunes Realty (homepage) ("Since 1969 ... Garden City and Surfside Beach")https://www.dunes.com/
- Sandpiper Realty, "About" ("founded in 1969"; Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard)https://www.sandpiperrealty.com/about/
- Holiday Real Estate, Ocean City MD ("serving the Ocean City area since 1969"; third-generation)https://www.holidayoc.com/
- Stan White Realty & Construction ("began in the home of Stan White in 1972")https://www.outerbanksrentals.com/stan-white-realty
- Garden City Realty, "About Us" ("Established in June 1973"; ~400 homes)https://www.gardencityrealty.com/about-us
- Crowley Associates Realty (homepage) ("since 1973"; 750+ rentals)https://www.crowleyrealestate.com/
- Sand 'N Sea Properties, "Who We Are" ("founded by Bert and David Feinman in 1974"; 185+ homes)https://www.sandnsea.com/about-us/who-we-are
- Brett/Robinson, "History" ("Incorporated in 1974"; 1,000+ properties)https://www.brett-robinson.com/history-of-brettrobinson/
- Jack Lingo, Realtor, "About" ("In 1974, our founder, retired Air Force Colonel Jack Lingo, established our real estate company")https://www.jacklingo.com/about
- Young's Suncoast ("began in 1975 when he co-founded Young's Realty")https://www.youngssuncoast.com/blog/youngs-suncoast-enters-a-new-era-as-king-hands-over-broker-role-to-bodenhamer/
- Twiddy & Company, "About" ("In 1978, Twiddy & Company Realtors opened its first office ... in Duck Village"; 1,000+ homes)https://www.twiddy.com/about/
- Sun Realty, "About Us" ("established in 1980 ... Kill Devil Hills")https://www.sunrealtync.com/about-us
- VRM Intel, "Vacasa Acquires Meyer Vacation Rentals" (Meyer founded 1967; acquired by Vacasa 2021)https://vrmintel.com/vacasa-acquires-meyer-vacation-rentals/
- ShortTermRentalz, "Vacasa expands in Virginia Beach" (Sandbridge Realty founded 1992; acquired January 2022)https://shorttermrentalz.com/news/vacasa-virginia-beach/