Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB) is seeking to supercharge its platform

Airbnb (NASDAQ: ABNB) is already so ubiquitous when it comes to short-term housing rentals that its name has become both a noun and a verb in a way that only the very biggest and best brands ever achieve. The company thinks it can go further, though, and it’s moving on several fronts to capture new customers amid concerns about the outlook for its more saturated markets. 

To start, Airbnb wants to expand the number of properties available on its platform with a new marketplace for hosts designed to simplify property management by connecting busy owners with individuals eager to handle day-to-day rental tasks. Communicating with demanding guests and coordinating with cleaners can quickly turn into a full-time job, and the company is hoping to unlock inventory by helping landlords who may not want to do all the dirty work themselves.

“There are people that have homes, but they don’t have time,” CEO Brian Chesky said earlier this month, detailing the new service set to launch in October. “There are other people in the world that have time, but they don’t have homes…What if we can match those two people together?”

Airbnb also wants to move beyond its core business with a relaunch of its experience product that lets tourists book anything from a Tango lesson in Buenos Aires to a pre-Hispanic sweat lodge renewal in Mexico City. It also hinted that the real potential for exponential growth might lie in simple geographic expansion.

“We operate nearly in every country in the world, but there’s only really five markets where we’re penetrated, and those markets are the US, UK, France, Canada and Australia,” Chesky said, noting that Latin America was the company’s fastest-growing region. “We’ve had a lot of progress in Brazil, but there is really Peru, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, these are huge opportunity markets.”

The plans for what Chesky says will be the next chapter for the company come as its shares have struggled, declining 23% over the past month amid concerns about slowing demand in the US. That’s despite solid second-quarter numbers that saw revenue increase 11% year-over-year. Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), Airbnb’s primary competitor, declined 1% over the same period, while Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) fell 3.6%.

Airbnb is frequently compared to other companies in the hospitality sector such as Marriott International (NASDAQ: MAR) or Hilton Worldwide Holdings (NYSE: HLT), but the company is above all the provider of a platform that’s uniquely positioned to capture exponential growth that a single hotel chain will never be able to access. And it’s largely able to do so without tying up any of its own capital. The company, meanwhile, has bought back shares worth $2.75 billion over the past 12 months, and Chesky said the company was authorized to spend another $5.25 billion on repurchases. That could be supportive of its stock price in the months to come regardless of how successful its new ventures turn out to be.