The Operator DNA Behind LOCALSBNB

Most property software starts with a market study. Ours started with a portfolio — and eleven years on, we are still running homes, still building the software, and still the people who have to live with it.

Last updated: September 17, 2026

Ask a software company where its product came from and you will usually hear about research. Ask us and you get a different answer: we were running holiday homes long before we had anything to sell, and the software exists because nothing we could buy handled the way the work actually happens.

Key Takeaways

• We were operators first. Locals Group was founded in 2015 and grew by running its own homes — more than 25,000 of them, across 150+ cities, on systems we wrote ourselves.
• Capital followed the operations, not a pitch. Six funding rounds between 2016 and 2024, including from ZhenFund, Hongtai Fund and Shunwei Capital, paid for homes and technology at once.
• The platform has a lineage, not a launch date. An internal tool for our own portfolio became a cloud platform used by hundreds of thousands of operators, then shipped internationally in 2026.
• Scale today: more than 1.5 million rooms, used by over 300,000 hospitality operators.
• In 2026 we moved again. An AI layer runs a property by question, inside the tools you already use.

What "operator DNA" means here

The phrase sounds like marketing, so let us be specific. A property manager is a collection of small decisions made under time pressure: whether to open two more nights, how to price a Saturday against a long weekend, who cleans what after a late checkout, which guest message to answer first. That is where money is made and lost, and a team that has only studied those decisions from the outside ranks them differently from one that has spent a decade making them.

We are the second kind of team. Every feature in LOCALSBNB exists because somebody in our own operation needed it, and almost every one of them was built after a bad week rather than before it.

2015: an operating company, not a software company

Locals Group was founded in 2015 by a team of 21 people from hospitality, travel and technology. Our founder had spent his career in hotels and helped grow a budget hotel chain from 300 properties to more than 3,000 with a staff of 40,000, then built three hotel brands of his own before starting over in short-term rentals.

The plan in 2015 was to run homes — apartments, houses and villas, mostly in cities where people actually live rather than hotel districts. That is what we did, city by city, for years.

Two things about that period matter today. First, scale came before tooling: we were operating thousands of properties before we had a product to sell. Second, we were never only landlords — taking on homes we did not own meant inheriting other people's problems, budgets and expectations, which is how we learned what owners worry about.

What we did for owners before there was a subscription

Our original business was services, not software. Five lines of work, run by our own teams:

1. Sourcing and management. Leasing and management agreements for homes we did not own.
2. Design. Interior design for each home, one property at a time rather than from a template.
3. Renovation and set-up. Renovation managed end to end, from cost plan to handover.
4. Photography and listing. Professional photography and the listing, produced in house.
5. Full operations. Day to day running: availability, rates, guest messaging and turnover between stays.

These were separate businesses with their own economics. At one point we were coordinating more than 1,300 designers and 400 photographers, with a renovation archive of over 50,000 projects. Owners we managed kept 90% of what their home earned; we kept 10%. When you are paid that way, you stop thinking about features and start thinking about occupancy.

That is the origin of the whole thing: not a roadmap, but a better tool for work we were already doing at scale.

The capital that backed the operating business

Investors came in while we were operating, not after. Between 2016 and 2024 the company raised six rounds:

• 2016 — angel round, RMB 30 million, to prove the operating model in a first group of cities.
• 2017 — Pre-A round, RMB 50 million, led by ZhenFund.
• 2017 — a strategic round, undisclosed, from a Guangdong cultural-investment fund.
• 2018 — Series A, several hundred million renminbi, led by Hongtai Fund, with Gaohé Hantong and ZhenFund following.
• 2018 — Series A2, RMB 100 million, from Shunwei Capital, for property expansion and technology.
• 2024 — Series A+, from Gaohé Hantong's fund and others.

The rounds kept both halves moving: homes that generated the requirements, and engineers who could act on them. They also imposed a discipline — a portfolio has to pay for itself, and a feature that only looks good in a demo does not survive a real owner's monthly statement.

Then, almost by accident, the software

Somewhere in the middle of that growth we went looking for a channel manager. Nothing on the market fit: the tools we tried were shaped around a hotel front desk — one building, one reception, one person watching one screen. Our reality was scattered homes in different cities, several people involved in every turnover, guests arriving after midnight, and the same night sold on more than one platform.

So we built our own, and put it into our own operations first. For years it was an internal system; it became a product later, once other operators started asking to use it. In China, that platform is known as Locals Cloud.

The order of events is the point. The data model was shaped by our portfolio, not a survey, and every workflow was first tested on our own calendar — a harder test than a pilot programme.

One core, two editions

In 2026 the same system shipped internationally as LOCALSBNB. It is not a translation of the Chinese product; it is one core with different defaults.

For overseas portfolios the platform connects to Airbnb, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com through API integrations. Rates, length-of-stay rules and listing details live in one place per property; availability is pushed from a single calendar, so a night you close is closed everywhere; Airbnb guest messages collect in one inbox. Owners, assistants and housekeepers see only the part of the account their job needs, and occupancy, average daily rate and revenue sit in one view readable in under a minute.

It runs in six interface languages, shows money in each property's own currency, and treats "this week" as Monday to Sunday in the property's own time zone — a small thing that stops being small once you manage homes in two countries.

Pricing is deliberately plain: a flat per-room fee rather than a share of your bookings — $4.5 per room per month billed annually, or $7 billed monthly. You can see the current plans at localsbnb.com before you commit.

Where the platform stands today

The numbers, as of 2026:

• More than 1.5 million rooms are managed through the platform.
• More than 300,000 hospitality operators use it.
• Our own operating business has run north of 25,000 homes across 150+ cities.
• We have put 40–50% of revenue back into research and development every year since the beginning.
• The group was recognised as a National High-Tech Enterprise in 2021.

The first two matter most because we did not plan them. The platform was built for a few thousand homes of our own and grew because other operators had the same problems.

2026: the AI layer

The most recent change is not a new dashboard. It is the removal of one.

In 2026 we released an open-source connector that puts LOCALSBNB inside the AI assistant you already use — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf or VS Code Copilot — rather than asking you to install a fifth app. You ask in plain language and your properties answer: who is arriving today, which rooms are free on Saturday, what this week's occupancy and average rate were, how Friday to Sunday is priced on each channel.

It also acts, with a deliberate limit. Check-in, check-out, extensions and room moves can be executed for overseas properties, but only through a two-step confirmation: the first request returns a preview of who, which room and which dates, and nothing changes until you approve it. Properties in China are read-only, and cancellations are not in the first version.

The code is public — github.com/localsbnb/localsbnbAi — which is unusual in this category and intentional: you should be able to see what a system does before you let it near your calendar.

Why this matters when you are choosing software

Nearly every vendor in this category says it understands hosts. Almost none still run properties. The difference shows up in unglamorous places: how fast a calendar updates, whether a housekeeper can get access without getting the whole account, whether rates are edited per property or per channel. Those are not demo features; they are the residue of operating at scale.

So, practically: when you evaluate any property management system, ask three things.

1. Who built this, and do they still operate properties?
2. Which channels are connected natively, and what happens when two of them sell the same night?
3. What does the pricing reward — your revenue, or theirs?

A vendor that answers from experience will answer quickly. One that answers from a script will not.

Frequently asked questions

Are you a software company or an operating company?

Both, and in that order. Our operating business produces the requirements; the software is how we act on them at scale. We still run our own homes today.

Where is LOCALSBNB available?

The overseas edition is built for hosts and managers outside mainland China, with localised languages, currencies and time zones. Our Chinese cloud platform serves the domestic market separately.

Does the AI layer change my bookings on its own?

No. Booking-altering actions require an explicit second confirmation and apply only to overseas properties.

Is there a minimum number of properties?

No. It runs the same way for two homes and two hundred.

If you would rather judge it on your own portfolio than on a page like this, you can start free at localsbnb.com and add properties as you go.

---

Features, channels and pricing change over time, so confirm current details before you commit. Results vary by market, season, property type and pricing. LOCALSBNB provides software, not financial or legal advice.