With backgrounds in high-performance sport, Greg Owen and Scott Unsworth are uniquely placed to understand the needs of those at the top of their field.

Greg was formerly the high-performance director at Canoe Racing New Zealand and Scott is a former a world-class triathlete and founder of internationally successful sports brand Orca.

Together, the friends have transferred their skills into an equally demanding sector, the provision of luxury accommodation.

Their business, Stay Luxe, offers discerning travellers ultra-luxe accommodation options when they are visiting New Zealand; and providing owners of the properties a means by which to monetise their mansions.

Natural progression

Greg and Scott’s journey into luxury short-term accommodation has been a natural outworking of a major renovation they’d undertaken previously.

Scott owned a block of four units on a corner site in Mission Bay, Auckland. But he was aware that residential or commercial tenancies didn’t have the power to generate the yields he was looking for: short-term holiday rentals could attract two or three times the income achieved with long-term rentals.

Scott asked Greg to help to project manage the transformation of the properties into charming coastal getaways. The four units turned into eight; targeted at the middle sector of the market, they soon started paying their way.

The returns immediately leaped from 3 to 15 per cent; the units’ amazing location, next to one of Auckland’s best-loved beaches, attracting much tourist interest.

Scott also owns a property on Takapuna Beach; this was also renovated and targeted at the upper end of the short-term market.

In the process of converting Scott’s properties to short-term rentals, the pair became aware of a notable gap in the luxury accommodation space.

High net-worth individuals coming to Auckland didn’t have a dedicated platform on which they (or more likely their assistants) could source properties of the quality they expected.

Instead, they would need to set strict search criteria and scroll through the likes of Airbnb to find what they needed.

Scott and Greg had contacts with luxury apartments and properties in Auckland that weren’t being used – many that had been taken off the market because they weren’t selling.

So, last year, the pair decided to launch a dedicated luxury short-term accommodation website, which they called Stay Luxe.

Invest in luxury

Greg was the brains behind the Stay Luxe website and has been active in growing the business. And since its inception, the business has grown to incorporate 30 properties, mainly in Auckland, but also in Taupo and Nelson.

The properties range from $500 a night for one or two-bedroom dwellings, to $20,000 a night for penthouse apartments.

There’s the clifftop mansion with Hamptons’ style architecture, a pool and a spa, in Auckland’s East Coast Bays ($8,000 a night); and Kinloch Manor on Lake Taupo, located on 254 hectares of land.

Stay Luxe utilises Google Ad Words and Airbnb Luxe to market their properties: 60 per cent of the bookings they receive go directly to their site.

Accommodation scouts who source luxury properties for the rich and famous have taken notice already: “We had Pink lined up to come and stay when she was touring, but the swimming pool in the property she was looking at wasn’t ready, and her children wanted a pool, so sadly that fell through,” says Scott.

Attention to detail is key in this space. One of the most important aspects of luxury accommodation is ensuring the homes maintain an extremely high level of cleanliness.

“We have very stringent standards for cleaning our properties,” says Scott.

“This is extremely important; when you are paying large amounts of money for short-term accommodation, everything needs to be perfect.”

Another important component of the business is creating networks with others in this space.

Scott and Greg are members The Luxury Network New Zealand, an international luxury marketing group that helps creates new business partnerships through strategic alliances, endorsements and B2B networking. It’s ideal for them and they have been able to create great connections through this platform.

Greg and Scott are very much still the early stages of the brand; they are looking to grow their portfolio of properties and further their reach into the international market.

“The majority of our guests come from the United States, so we really want to increase our visibility in that market,”says Greg.