Feature photo: Dana and team Rent Responsibly with the board members of Arizonans for Responsible Tourism and the Scottsdale STRA in Phoenix, AZ
Dana Lubner, director of community development at Rent Responsibly, is the company’s resident short-term rental celebrity of sorts.
She was the first hire by Rent Responsibly founders, Dave Krauss and Alexa Nota. And her name preceded her after a fierce advocacy firefight to save short-term rentals in Denver.
Dana came from a background in marketing and advertising but was ready for a change when she accepted her brother’s offer to work at his vacation rental management company, Effortless Rental Group, in January 2018. She still serves on the board of the company.
“I joined his team in the sales and property acquisitions department and instantly fell in love with the vacation rental community,” Dana said. “I became obsessed with learning everything I could about the industry and sponged up every podcast, article, and opportunity to learn and only fell deeper in love. I felt at home in this community like no other career had done for me.”
Saving short-term rentals in Denver
In June 2019, Denver’s hosting community came under attack in a scene that qualifies for stranger than fiction. STR hosts were getting arrested on suspicions of falsifying their primary residence and other charges, and their mugshots were appearing in the newspaper. So, Dana teamed up with hosts, property managers, and others in the industry to form an STR alliance.
The goal of the alliance, Mile High Hosts, was to show the city that STR hosts were by and large “responsible residents, operators, and community ambassadors” and to save the industry from regulations that would shut down their businesses, Dana said.
One of the ways that Mile High Hosts helps to elevate their profession and their reputation in their community is with their annual Good Neighbor Summit. The event provides professional development that helps hosts to rent responsibly and be good neighbors to others in the community.
Two stars collide
Dana met Dave at the 2019 summit where he was a guest speaker.
“We instantly connected and soon found out that we were birthday twins and clearly long-lost siblings separated from birth,” Dana quipped.
At the time, Rent Responsibly was a two-member team, founders Dave and Alexa, that sought to respond to a gaping need for standardization, self-regulation, and advocacy in the industry.
“That mission that Rent Responsibly was looking to accomplish was the exact support I needed when I started my own local alliance,” Dana said. “I desperately needed access to others in the community facing similar challenges and tools and resources I was having to build in the nonexistent 25th hour of the day.”
And Dana, it turned out, was exactly what Rent Responsibly needed the following year to take the next step in its mission.
Head of leadership development
In 2020, Dave and Alexa recruited Dana as their head of leadership development in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. She joined the team in late September of that year.
“It presented me the opportunity to turn my newfound passion for community-building and advocacy into a full-time career as their first hire,” Dana said.
Another reason she was drawn to Rent Responsibly is its company culture.
“As community builders, we can’t do it successfully without having our own house in order,” she said. “Our team is genuinely passionate, authentic, and deeply dedicated to our mission. We look out for each other and how we can support each other’s success, building a shared vision.”
Her role involves supporting local community members and helping them to understand the power they have not just to influence policy, legislation, and regulatory outcomes, but also to build long-standing self-sustainable communities. She helps STR alliances get established and organized and facilitates meetings. She connects alliance leaders with policy experts and political professionals like lobbyists and government relations specialists to help them advocate for themselves in the political process. She also organizes educational events for community group leaders that are based on specific challenges that they face. And she still heads up the annual Good Neighbor Summit.
She loves seeing members of the STR community grow into leaders and encourage others into leadership roles. That includes seeing people who were terrified of public speaking become civically engaged and get up in front of a group and passionately speak on behalf of the STR community.
When she started at Rent Responsibly, she worked with leaders from four alliances and now works with leaders from 10 alliances nationwide.
Learn more about Rent Responsibly’s Alliance Support Services
Some of those alliances are on their way to becoming self-sufficient and bringing in their own revenue. She is proud of how far they have come and the educational and resource support she has been able to provide for them.
“I’m proud of the series of Leader Seminars we’ve hosted designed specifically for leaders of local community groups,” Dana said. “Being a leader of my own local alliance, I know firsthand the pains and challenges leaders face. Getting to pick topics that we know the community is struggling with is fulfilling from a support perspective but also truly inspiring to me personally getting to learn from the pioneers in our space.”
One of the major challenges of her job is getting the STR community engaged and active in the civic process. Many times individuals don’t understand the power they hold as members of a community perhaps because they have never exercised using their voice to weigh in on political decision-making or they feel there’s no hope, Dana said.
“The folks I work with are volunteering their time for their community. They already have full-time jobs, busy lives and so much going on,” Dana said. “Being a leader of an alliance is a lot of work physically, mentally, and emotionally.”
Leadership role model
Dana is also the host of the podcast series How to Save Your Vacation Rental Business, the fruit of a partnership with Matt Landau of VRMB. Their first episode was released days after she joined Rent Responsibly. The podcast’s third season launches this fall.
Dana’s passion, knowledge, and grace under pressure have inspired many hosts and property managers to become leaders of their local STR alliance.
Linda Curry and John Hildebrand, board members for Arizonans for Responsible Tourism, have both said they were inspired by Dana. They worked with Dana for two years over Zoom before finally meeting her in person during a Rent Responsibly employee retreat in Arizona in late September 2022.
“Wow, truly blessed to finally hang with Dana Lubner of Rent Responsibly,” John wrote in a LinkedIn post after the meeting.
“It’s crazy how the world puts people together,” he continued. “Three years ago, I was listening to a podcast with Dana Lubner and thought to myself, how cool would it be to meet her. Now I get to work with her daily (over Zoom).”
Recharge and reset
In her free time, Dana said music, her family, and her dog, Hendrix, are her life.
“I know most of my closest friends through music,” she said. “We love seeing live music. My husband is a producer and DJ and plays the music that fuels my soul. House music is my fave – hands down.”
Hendrix, a 16-year-old petite German Shepherd mix, is her “source of recharge and reset during the workday when I need to step away from the computer and get in some snuggles or an afternoon walk outdoors.”
Dana also loves to travel and in mid-October 2022 just returned from a trip to Ecuador to meet her husband’s Ecuadorian family that he lived with when he taught English in the country in 2002.
“We adventured everywhere from Mount Chimborazo – whose summit is the farthest point on the Earth’s surface from the Earth’s center given that it is located along the planet’s equatorial bulge – to rafting in the jungles,” Dana said. “It was a trip of a lifetime and one that opens your eyes to other cultures that I’ve been so closed off to, especially with the pandemic.”
Going global
In September 2020, she traveled to Portugal to present at the Vacation Rental World Summit, expanding her voice to a global audience.
“Knowing I was going to be speaking to a global audience I had to consider how the audience could be different from a U.S. audience,” she said. “What I soon found out was that we are the same; we may speak different languages, but the challenges are the same, and there’s a huge opportunity to harness the potential of an even larger united voice to build sustainable regulations and balanced communities.”
Dana models for others how to never stop growing as people and leaders. During a recent staff meeting, Alexa complimented her for always looking for ways to improve and to be better.
Dana’s latest mantra is “make future Dana proud.”
“Set up future Dana today in a way that you can high-five yourself and say, “Nice. I’m so glad I put in the effort on these activities today to make things easier tomorrow.”
This story was originally published in October 2022 and updated in May 2023 to reflect her new title.
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