HB Exclusive: Wyndham partners with Reside for residences

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts has partnered with Reside, a furnished corporate housing company, to add residences to its portfolio. Reside will fill its unoccupied spaces for long-term and short-term stays using Wyndham’s distribution channels and other benefits.

“Reside is a corporate housing company at its core,” said Lee Curtis, CEO/cofounder, Reside. “Its original predecessor company was Aboda, which was born out of Microsoft’s original needs for furnished apartments for interns 35 years ago. That company grew into one of the dominant corporate housing companies in the country.”

Until this agreement, Curtis said the company was solely B2B, dealing with corporate clients to meet their employee housing needs.

“Their business model is a great one where you can build some of the base business with some corporate extended-stay, and then on nights or weekends when they are not there, you can fill your inventory with the transient or leisure demand,” said Amit Sripathi, chief development officer, Wyndham. “It was a good opportunity for us because they have had the traditional non-hotel-use corporate-type, and we have a very strong platform through Wyndham Advantage. We can help them scale quickly and bring in different demand generators that are complementary to the kind of corporate housing lineage they have. It just made sense for the partnership to work together.

Before this agreement, Reside has had a few of its locations, including Beekman Towers in New York and Broadway Plaza near the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, in the Wyndham system since 2021 as part of the Trademark Collection. Other properties, including Reside Seattle Downtown, a Wyndham Residence, are being added to the portfolio.

“That started a conversation with Wyndham regarding this idea of growth in the branded, furnished market,” said Curtis. “We have seen through the last 10 years a growth in interest into what I’ll call hotel alternatives.”

While Wyndham will help supply both short- and long-term guests, Sripathi places Reside in its extended-stay offerings. “If you look at our extended-stay strategy, we’ve got economy extended-stay through Echo Suites,” he said. “We already have the midscale product through Hawthorne. We added an upscale product with WaterWalk.”

Wyndham’s experience in extended-stay was a big plus for Curtis. “What we liked particularly was that they had a keen understanding of the extended-stay space and interest in it,” he said. “As we come in, as Reside, we’re not cannibalizing anything they’re currently doing, which is really the issue a lot of the other brands have as they are trying to get into the space, is that they are going to cannibalize somebody. We liked that the space was clean and white.”