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.
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.
There are many ways to describe one of the prevailing urban forms emerging across the Greater Toronto Area. You could call it spiky urbanism. You could call it a collection of peaks and plains. Or -- as it is referred to in this recent article by Alex Bozikovic about "turning the suburb into the city" -- you could call it cruise ship urbanity:
These megaprojects are where Toronto has chosen to cram much of its new growth – “cruise ships of urbanity,” as Mr. Giannone told me, in a sea of houses. As such they provide an opportunity to create citylike density and activity.
What we are talking about is a dichotomous form of urbanism: high-density mixed-use nodes surrounded by low-rise car-oriented communities. And on many levels, this makes a lot of sense, especially if the cruise ship happens to be docked on top of a transit station. This is where density needs to go. If you have a transit station without much density, that should be addressed immediately.
But it also presents a great challenge. If transportation planning is necessarily land use planning, then we are dealing with two very different kinds of land use patterns and, therefore, two very different kinds of mobility demands. You can address this by making the cruise ship as self-sufficient and pleasant as possible, but eventually someone will want or need to get off the ship.
Does that mean they will then need a car?
You don't have this same problem with more consistent forms of urbanism. Consider, for example, cities like Paris and Barcelona. These are dense cities, but more importantly they are, for the most part, uniformly dense. Or at least, uniformly dense enough. Meaning that you can probably apply a more uniform transportation strategy. What works in one part of the city is likely to work in other parts too.
Of course, we could also apply a uniform transportation strategy to our urban cruise ships. Given that they exist in a sea of low-rise houses, we could simply say that each urban cruise ship resident should also have their own parking space (1:1 ratio). The solution: everyone drives! But this, to me, seems like an insane long-term solution.
In my view, the most impactful solution lies not in the ships themselves, but in the seas surrounding them. We need to look holistically at our entire city region and determine what it will take to turn suburb into city. And that likely means a whole host of things, ranging from leveraging the infrastructure we already have (i.e. upzoning around transit stations) to embracing autonomous vehicles.
In the end, I don't think we want cruise ships of urbanity. We need more density, everywhere.
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.
Not surprisingly, the responses were divided. Some responded saying that beauty is more important than density, and a lot of people were quick to point out that there's good density and there's bad density. And because I can appreciate both of these comments, it made me think that I should probably elaborate on my glib tweet.
The points I was trying to vaguely imply are the following.
More often than not (at least for North American cities), I think our problem is not too much density, it's too little. This translates into cities that aren't walkable, aren't conducive to transit, and that are overall less sustainable. Right now, every mayoral candidate in Toronto is promising to fix our crippling traffic congestion. I don't know how they're going to do it, but they're promising it because they know it's something people are pissed off about.
But here's my take: counterintuitively, the problem is not enough density. The problem is that too many people in our region have no reasonable way to get around without a car. So they're forced to drive. The way you fix this not as simple as more traffic enforcement or better signal timing. Good luck! You fix it through density, because density is what makes other forms of mobility suddenly possible.
All of this is not to say that density alone will render you a great city. Obviously things like beauty also matter a great deal. But in my opinion, density is a fundamental component. Because what good is beauty if you don't have any urban vibrancy? The answer is that you probably don't have a real city.
The other point I was trying to make is that space and density are both relative and oftentimes difficult to understand. We think building height and density are correlated, but that's not always the case. Look at Paris or Barcelona. We also like to make a lot of spatial rules that we think are right and make our cities better: streets should be at least this wide, buildings should be no taller than the width of the street, and so on.
But here (pictured above) is a street that narrows to around 6 meters and has buildings that are probably 2.5-3x the width of the right-of-way. Sure, it also happens to be beautiful, historic, and Italian. But what would happen if you maintained this same beauty and made the street 5x as wide and lined up parking in front of the stores?
Somehow it wouldn't be as enjoyable as what you see here.
There are many ways to describe one of the prevailing urban forms emerging across the Greater Toronto Area. You could call it spiky urbanism. You could call it a collection of peaks and plains. Or -- as it is referred to in this recent article by Alex Bozikovic about "turning the suburb into the city" -- you could call it cruise ship urbanity:
These megaprojects are where Toronto has chosen to cram much of its new growth – “cruise ships of urbanity,” as Mr. Giannone told me, in a sea of houses. As such they provide an opportunity to create citylike density and activity.
What we are talking about is a dichotomous form of urbanism: high-density mixed-use nodes surrounded by low-rise car-oriented communities. And on many levels, this makes a lot of sense, especially if the cruise ship happens to be docked on top of a transit station. This is where density needs to go. If you have a transit station without much density, that should be addressed immediately.
But it also presents a great challenge. If transportation planning is necessarily land use planning, then we are dealing with two very different kinds of land use patterns and, therefore, two very different kinds of mobility demands. You can address this by making the cruise ship as self-sufficient and pleasant as possible, but eventually someone will want or need to get off the ship.
Does that mean they will then need a car?
You don't have this same problem with more consistent forms of urbanism. Consider, for example, cities like Paris and Barcelona. These are dense cities, but more importantly they are, for the most part, uniformly dense. Or at least, uniformly dense enough. Meaning that you can probably apply a more uniform transportation strategy. What works in one part of the city is likely to work in other parts too.
Of course, we could also apply a uniform transportation strategy to our urban cruise ships. Given that they exist in a sea of low-rise houses, we could simply say that each urban cruise ship resident should also have their own parking space (1:1 ratio). The solution: everyone drives! But this, to me, seems like an insane long-term solution.
In my view, the most impactful solution lies not in the ships themselves, but in the seas surrounding them. We need to look holistically at our entire city region and determine what it will take to turn suburb into city. And that likely means a whole host of things, ranging from leveraging the infrastructure we already have (i.e. upzoning around transit stations) to embracing autonomous vehicles.
In the end, I don't think we want cruise ships of urbanity. We need more density, everywhere.
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.
Not surprisingly, the responses were divided. Some responded saying that beauty is more important than density, and a lot of people were quick to point out that there's good density and there's bad density. And because I can appreciate both of these comments, it made me think that I should probably elaborate on my glib tweet.
The points I was trying to vaguely imply are the following.
More often than not (at least for North American cities), I think our problem is not too much density, it's too little. This translates into cities that aren't walkable, aren't conducive to transit, and that are overall less sustainable. Right now, every mayoral candidate in Toronto is promising to fix our crippling traffic congestion. I don't know how they're going to do it, but they're promising it because they know it's something people are pissed off about.
But here's my take: counterintuitively, the problem is not enough density. The problem is that too many people in our region have no reasonable way to get around without a car. So they're forced to drive. The way you fix this not as simple as more traffic enforcement or better signal timing. Good luck! You fix it through density, because density is what makes other forms of mobility suddenly possible.
All of this is not to say that density alone will render you a great city. Obviously things like beauty also matter a great deal. But in my opinion, density is a fundamental component. Because what good is beauty if you don't have any urban vibrancy? The answer is that you probably don't have a real city.
The other point I was trying to make is that space and density are both relative and oftentimes difficult to understand. We think building height and density are correlated, but that's not always the case. Look at Paris or Barcelona. We also like to make a lot of spatial rules that we think are right and make our cities better: streets should be at least this wide, buildings should be no taller than the width of the street, and so on.
But here (pictured above) is a street that narrows to around 6 meters and has buildings that are probably 2.5-3x the width of the right-of-way. Sure, it also happens to be beautiful, historic, and Italian. But what would happen if you maintained this same beauty and made the street 5x as wide and lined up parking in front of the stores?
Somehow it wouldn't be as enjoyable as what you see here.
