I don't know for exactly how long, but for a very long time people have been trying to solve this real estate problem: "I have a desire to own a home, or multiple homes, around the world. However, I don't know how often I'd actually use it/them, and this desire is both expensive and a pain in the ass."
And so unless you have a lot of money and can make the pain in the ass part go away, there seems to exist an ongoing need to make fulfilling this desire both cheaper and easier. Perhaps the most common ways are through a timeshare property or through some kind of fractional ownership structure, where you own a share of a property.
Some companies are even "tokenizing" this second structure on blockchains. I have read about one company that is buying vacation homes and then issuing 365 corresponding tokens. Each token represents 1 day of occupancy (and actual title ownership apparently). In theory this sounds kind of neat, but you're also buying a second home with potentially 364 other strangers.
So here's another approach that I just learned about. The UK-based company, August, has devised a model that works like this:
August starts with "homeowner curation." Meaning, they start by vetting homeowners to make sure that they're not weird or something.
Once they have a suitable collection of homeowners, August sets up a new real estate entity that all of the homeowners must then fund equally.
This entity, by way of August, goes out and buys 5 properties, and each homeowner receives an equal share of the ownership. (Typically, they target 16-21 groups per entity.)
August renovates the 5 properties, gets them ready for occupancy, and then manages them on ongoing basis. This includes bookings.
Finally, each homeowner gets an average of 8-10 weeks per year across all of their homes.
In terms of the homes themselves, their pied-à-terre collection includes homes in Paris, Rome, Cannes, Barcelona, and London. They are typically between 70-100 square meters with 2 bedrooms and 1-2 bathrooms. And the average price/value is supposedly around €1,250,000 (post-renovation?), with the entry price of a share starting at €340,000.
I'm not sure if this share figure is based on 21 homeowners, but if it is, then that's €7,140,000 of equity being raised in order to buy somewhere around €6,250,000 of real estate. Is the spread their margin for setting this all up? There's also an annual fee per owner (€8,600), which presumably covers operating costs and the ongoing management of the properties.
A model like this naturally provokes a lot of questions. What happens if somebody wants to sell? Does the next buyer need to be similarly vetted for overall weirdness? And how liquid is 1/21st of a 5-property apartment portfolio? I don't know these answers, but intuitively these shares have got to be less liquid than a 100% sale.
However, as a solution to the problem of "I have a desire to own homes across Europe but I'm not quite rich enough to make it truly carefree", this seems like a pretty clever solution.
