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This month City Relay celebrates its fifth birthday and reflects on five years of managing short, mid and long lets for London homeowners. A lot has changed over those five years, and the expansion of City Relay mirrors the continuous growth in demand for vacation rentals and long let rentals in the UK capital.
Back in 2015, there were roughly 10,800 entire homes listed on Airbnb in London. Fast forward to the present day, and there are more than 43,000 homes available to book across Greater London, earning Londoners anywhere in the region of £2,500 – £3,375 from short letting their homes in any given month. And of course, there are more booking channels now with the likes of Booking.com, Expedia and Tripadvisor getting in on the action. Today the distribution team at City Relay manage property listings on over 30 platforms.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, London visitors are now choosing a safe and clean home over a hotel more than ever before, and coupled with an increase in ‘Staycations’ within the UK, City Relay has grown to meet the increased demand for short let properties. The growth has also extended across to our long let operation, experiencing 22% portfolio growth since April, within the increasingly competitive marketplace.
Now entering its sixth year of operations, City Relay has three Reception Spaces across London where our team meet and greet guests and advise and assist hosts. While the company has changed and evolved, delivering a superior service to customers and adopting sustainable and eco-friendly ways of working remains at the heart of the business.
Our team works incredibly hard to deliver a 5-star experience to all guests as well as ensure our landlords homes and their revenues are protected. We are incredibly proud of our Trustpilot TrustScore of 4.8 out of 5 based on ratings and reviews from our customers. We’re ranked #1 for Airbnb management companies. We’re equally passionate about our community and the environment and have implemented initiatives throughout our operations to become carbon-neutral. Projects have been put in place to reduce single-use plastics, replace petrol-driven vans with electric-powered vehicles, provide guests with eco-friendly amenities, recycle more and use organic cleaning and laundry products.
City Relay was created back in 2015 to solve the challenges of short letting based on the personal experiences of our CEO and founder, Maxime Leufroy-Murat. Maxime was juggling a career as well as his guests, and while it was rewarding, it was at times more work than he could manage. He needed people he could trust to help him manage bookings, check-ins, housekeeping, laundry and guest communications. Maxime had the help of friends and could hire cleaners, but there was no local one-stop-shop he could count on to provide a quality service. So Maxime created an end-to-end property management company and City Relay was born. And still to this day Maxime offers his home to rent through City Relay along with 350 other happy London homeowners.
Find out what you could earn
To find out how much you could earn from short letting your London home with us, use our instant rent estimation tool or contact us to enquire about our long let service.
