16 ms·

Pacaso is turning houses into corporations

125 points by js2 5y ago

Zelphyr 5y ago
I remember when technology solved real problems for real people. It wasn't that long ago. Now, we have this nonsense.
- bhhaskin 5y ago
  Like what?
  - mbreese 5y ago
    I’m hungry, but I’m stuck at a desk with a computer and a T1 line. https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html Side note: not too long after the PizzaNet site, I would often order pizza from a computer lab at the end (ahem) of class so that it was waiting for me by the time I walked home. A critical problem for grad students.
    - refurb 5y ago
      If only there was a way to transmit my voice to the company to place the order.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        That would still count as technology, though.
  - pyrale 5y ago
    Well, a recent arn-editing technology helped produce vaccines in record time to fight a global pandemic, for instance. If you want something closer to computers, https://covidtracker.fr/ https://covidtracker.fr/ set up a site to help following epidemic data as well as a site to get a vaccine appointment more easily. The kicker? It's just people using technology to solve a problem, there's no sales afterthought, no business plan, no grift involved.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  A) They're not a tech company, as many people love to claim for investors these days. B) They are, however, solving someone's problem. Just because you don't share the same desires, doesn't mean that they're not addressing someone's need/want. C) Technology still solves a lot of "real" problems, but we have enough of it to solve a lot of frivolous things. (it would be funny if you work for FB, Twitter or tiktok... while writing this message)
reacharavindh 5y ago
Oh the AirBnB of home ownership. As it sounds, they are one regulation/ruling away from going bankrupt. Silicon Valley is full of Snake Oil buyers. I wish I had the tenacity to sell some.
- kortex 5y ago
  > As it sounds, they are one regulation/ruling away from going bankrupt. I can't wait. I'm sure it'll move with all the haste of government bureaucracy, but the sooner this gets shut down, the better. This is inevitably going to entangle tons of people who don't know better or think they can make a buck. It's a recipe for creating legal rats nests. No (with a material interest) wins. I don't even think the banks win. Early investors will make out like bandits. People with purely fiscal interests will largely win (some will get hosed). Equity owners will lose. Information-poor decision makers will lose. Prospective buyers in the neighborhood will probably see collateral damage.
  - reacharavindh 5y ago
    It is a con job. In some sense, it is Darwinism for people who choose to invest in them I guess? But, it’s all about whether they can jump before the ship sinks.
ramesh31 5y ago
Leave it to SV startups to reinvent the timeshare.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Yep: >>To make second home ownership possible for more people — and, of course, make money — Pacaso uses a "fractional home ownership" model. They buy a house, lightly refurbish it, furnish it and then create an LLC for it. They then divvy up ownership of this corporatized house into eight fractions and sell those shares on their website. >>If you buy a share in a house, you're able to stay in it 44 nights per year, in increments that can't exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. Edit: Ah, and if you read further, it’s an attempt to get around the regulations and taxes on short term rentals: >>The county, Brad says, had designated their neighborhood an "exclusion zone," which bans Airbnb-style short-term rentals to preserve the "residential character" of communities. But Pacaso argues that their clients are not short-term renters. They are co-owners of an LLC. This also means they don't have to pay the typical taxes on short-term rentals.
- schnevets 5y ago
  Specifically to reinvent the timeshare while celebrating the purchase of a Lake Tahoe vacation home. I know it takes a certain level of delusion to become an entrepreneur, but things just seem to get more and more absurd.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  Hey, at least they avoided calling it a timeshare, so customers have a harder time seeing that there's no significant difference. Now juicers, on the other hand...
iso1210 5y ago
So a timeshare?
- Finnucane 5y ago
  Basically. Obviously, assigning ownership of a house to an LLC is not a new thing either. It is a traditional method for skeezy landlords and the wealthy to hide the identity of the actual owners.
kortex 5y ago
Do you want the ease of timesharing, the convenience of homeowner associations, the security of subprime mortgage bundling, the property-value-normalizing aspect of AirBnB, and the totally-not-bubbly aspect of MLMs? Boy, do I have a bridge^W unicorn for you! Edit: actually this probably is a fantastic company to invest in, precisely because humans are terrible and I have zero hope in our collective decision-making ability, especially in light of short-term profits.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  the crazy thing is, I'm pretty sure there are people that would jump on that first sentence.
  - kortex 5y ago
    I'm sure. Timeshares are a thing. Juicero was a thing. MLMs and myriad other scammy things continue to be things despite a ton of outcry against them. Everyone thinks they won't be the one left holding the bag.
impostervt 5y ago
Seems very similar to this other, recently launched y-combinator company, Ancana: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379
spamizbad 5y ago
Seems like a "modernized" approach to timeshares, likely targeted towards cosmopolitan millennials. But I could be missing something.
codingdave 5y ago
As easy as it is to mock these guys for re-inventing timeshares, it does pose interesting legal questions on... Nope, no, sorry, I really am trying to come up with a substantive discussion point, but this is literally just timeshares. Timeshares do have value if you truly want to spend your vacation every year in the same place at the same time, but that is such a rare desire that most people end up avoiding them like the plague. I'm not seeing anything of interest here at all from a business perspective, just a few people re-hashing old ideas and ticking off their neighbors.
- Lazare 5y ago
  Old-school timeshare companies sometimes tried to organise "swaps", which somewhat solves the "every vacation at the same place" issue if it works, which, anecdotally, it almost never did. Still, it was a selling point. I suppose nothing would stop you from doing something similar with Pacaso, but it seems they haven't got a first party solution yet. Which is amusing, because it is one place where some technology might help.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    My old boss often swapped his family's holiday timeshare with other options with no hassle. Though he had a rather expensive option to start with (five star, gold season, …) so most swaps were effectively downgrades, maybe it is much more problematic to switch sideways (or near impossible upwards).
- tantalor 5y ago
  Pacaso: > co-owners collectively own real estate, not time Also Pacaso: > Your access depends on the number of shares you own. Each share includes 44 stay nights, and they are tracked on a 365-day basis. https://www.pacaso.com/faq/scheduling https://www.pacaso.com/faq/scheduling
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Ah, but see, you own a -share- in the real estate, and the time is just a bonus that's included! After all, if you owned all the shares, you'd be able to stay in it all you wanted! eyeroll
Lazare 5y ago
Confusing headline. The story seems to be: There's a new startup called Pacaso selling timeshares. Like most people who sell timeshares, they loudly claim they aren't timeshares at all. Unlike most people who sell timeshares, they also ignore all laws against timeshares. Because we live in the dumbest timeline, because they claim to be a tech company and not a timeshare company, this means they are now worth a billion dollars. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; timeshare promoters are well known for sleazy tactics and lies, so... (Mind you, they might well be an unusually good timeshare company, if you actually like timeshares for some reason.)
- game_the0ry 5y ago
  Thanks for the tl;dr. I love NPR, but this click-bait title rubs me the wrong way. Actually the whole article rubs me the wrong way. I wonder if Pacaso paid the writer and this is really just marketing disguised as news. Ugh, NPR, why?
  - qzw 5y ago
    NPR tries too hard to come across as neutral, responsible journalists sometimes. Once in a while I'd like them to just call something bullshit outright. But I guess that's what got us to this age of incivility, so maybe NPR's way is better.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      The best way to deal with BS is to not cover it at all. However controversy is a story that sells, so even seemingly neutral journalists will manufacture controversy just to get a story to be neutral about. You see it in all the vaccines stories that manufactures anti-vax sentiment in various groups.
- qzw 5y ago
  Title of pitch deck: Uber for Timeshares
- maxsilver 5y ago
  > Because we live in the dumbest timeline, because they claim to be a tech company and not a timeshare company, this means they are now worth a billion dollars. Well, we let the taxi service pretend to be not-a-taxi, and get away with it. We let the hotel service pretend to be not-a-hotel, and get away with it. Since no one is enforcing any reasonable rule of law, it's only a matter of time until 100% of all businesses follow suit. "We're not a hospital, we're a healthcare sharing service". "We're not a restaurant, we're a meal sharing experience". etc.
stopnamingnuts 5y ago
Clearly there are numerous markets supported by this model so I'm an outlier. My wife and I have considered fractional ownership of boats and vacation properties on several occasions. The things that turn me off every time is the inability to put a nail in a wall if I feel like it and the hassle overhead involved. I want to be able to whistle my dog into the car, hop in and go without having to coordinate with anybody else, knowing I have a toothbrush at my getaway spot.
- deleted 5y ago
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- bombcar 5y ago
  Things like AirBNB have really put the nail in the coffin for timeshares, why do something complicated when you can just rent a house for a month at the time you want? Similar things happen with boats, easier to rent when you need than try to fractionally own. It sometimes works with small planes, but often those are set up like a "rental" where all renters collectively "own" the little company that owns the plane.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    The amount of planning you already need to do to fly a plane makes shared ownership of a plane makes sense. And to be fair, a lot of the clubs will do shared ownership of a fleet of planes. Not just one.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Yeah, and over time the significant costs of plane ownership are directly tied to "runtime" on the engine - so a plane that's not being "rented" doesn't cost a ton to keep on the flight-line.
- vidarh 5y ago
  For me, to make a timeshare-like thing work, I think I'd need to be the owner with someone taking the hassle out of renting out access parts of the year, and repackaging financing around that. With respect to the toothbrush in your getaway spot, I sometimes wonder if there'd be a market for someone arranging picking up, storing and delivering luggage on demand. E.g. I might give up on owning if I can pick a flat to rent in a region I'd like to keep coming back to, and step on a plane with no luggage, knowing that when I got there, a chest with whatever I left behind last time had been cleaned, packaged up and stored and brought to the next place. Coming somewhere and having my clothes ready and waiting, and not have to thin about packing would be fantastic. You can get people to handle forwarding of your stuff from home, but that's complex and expensive. Of you come back to the same area or city regularly, then storage for a cubic meter or so of luggage with local-ish pickup and delivery a few times a year might well be reasonably cheap to operate.
MPSimmons 5y ago
> To make second home ownership possible for more people... Actual LOL. This is no different than Las Vegas time share scams. I hate HOAs with a passion, but in this case, any HOA would prevent this.
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ohgreatwtf 5y ago
if you are not going to live in a home at least 150 days a year you shouldn’t be able to buy it and that’s final
slang800 5y ago
Owning a "share" in one of these "house-companies" sounds like a nightmare. If you want to sell it off, you have to find someone who's willing to buy 1/8th of a house, or buy out 7 other owners to sell the house normally.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I just see way too many issues with maintenance and renovations and so on. Majority has to agree to these. Living in country where housing companies is standard model for apartments there is enough horror stories of smaller ones where old people save money and forgo things costing lot more in long run... At least there you can do most things inside the appartment you control.
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Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
The "haha, this really is timeshare" comments on this and on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 are missing the point. Let me tell you why, with an example from a niche I've been involved in for 25 years; the 250-year old inland waterways of the UK. Shared ownership is big business on the UK canals. A new narrowboat costs £100k+, and unless you're living afloat, most people only spend a few weeks on it every year. It makes a lot of sense, then, to share with other like-minded people: you get the same amount of holiday for a fraction of the cost. Traditional timeshare narrowboats exist too. But the model is very different, and much more like the "timeshare" you'd think of with villas/resorts/etc. You pay some sort of upfront cost and some sort of subscription to the timeshare company, in return for which they promise to give you some benefits. But with timeshare, it's all a contractual relationship with the timeshare company; you don't own any part of the boat, and if they go bankrupt, you're screwed. That's not what narrowboat shared ownership is. With shared ownership, you literally do own a 1/12th share of the boat. Once you and your fellow co-owners have bought it, the boat belongs entirely to you. You probably pay some sort of service charge to the company for co-ordinating bookings (arguments over school holidays are common), servicing, and so on. But the boat is yours. And this was proved c. 2008. The two biggest shared ownership companies, OwnerShips and Challenger Syndicateships, both went bust in short order. Both had over-expanded: forays into the French canal market, ambitious luxury boats which went over budget, and just plain avarice on the part of the founders. But in both cases, the boat sharers retained ownership of their boats. Some incidental service fees and associated funds held by the companies were lost, but the asset remained untouched. Those boats are still out there, still in shared ownership, and often with service/arrangement fees being paid to another company - because since you own the boat, you can just up sticks and deal with another company if you like, or none at all. Contrast with timeshare. If a timeshare company goes bust you have no recourse. You don't own the boat/apartment/whatever. You don't own anything. So please, less of the "this is just reinventing timeshare". It's a proven model, it works, and good luck to them. Edit: a couple of examples: https://www.bcbm.co.uk https://www.bcbm.co.uk, http://www.carefreecruising.com http://www.carefreecruising.com.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  It's a proven model for non-essential items that people don't use all the time. Which housing isn't. Hence why there's the community outrage and legal wrangling.
xt00 5y ago
So super mockable company but in many vacation communities some old folks die and pass on their nice house on the lake to their kids. So say 3 kids own the property now. So if timeshares are banned in that area I guess you would say those people need to not share it and force one family member to buy the others out or something? Or they would then need to sell the property I guess. Basically just throwing it out there that many of these houses end up being used by families and often essentially it’s co-owned and timeshared by multiple people —-but because they are the kids of the rich folks that used to live there then is ok I guess. Not talking about a red herring I’m talking about the actual reality that I’m aware of in multiple vacation communities I’ve visited.
- ghaff 5y ago
  In the Northeast US, it's not unusual to have some "summer cottage" or other large property that's been passed down through generations and is now jointly owned and used by a ton of grandchildren, cousins, and second cousins. I stayed in one a few weeks ago.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    That's what's called NIMBYism. It seems to be much more prevalent farther west. California seems to be the crown jewel for them.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I wouldn't never get involved with such thing. I'm glad that my parents got out of all of them they inherited, one is not really maintained, one is now filled with junk though maintained and last one was some land on an island in next country, meaning passing over sea twice... I do understand some level of attachment, but unless all owners agree on what to do there can be many headaches...
    - ghaff 5y ago
      And in fact, the owners sold the smaller house to one of the family members and the larger house which is split among something like 27 owners is now up for sale for something like $6million. As I wrote elsewhere I decided not to split my dad's house with my brother. Just seemed like too many opportunities for conflict. I'd rather just go up now and then when it's available.
cwp 5y ago
Having a website doesn't make you a tech company.
tw04 5y ago
So... timeshares with an app, but they're suing to not be classified as a timeshare because nobody wants them in their neighborhoods and are thus banned. They can't actually explain how they aren't a timeshare, other than "trust us we aren't and unicorn disruption!" >Potentially even more damaging to Pacaso's ambitions, however: timeshares are banned in many vacation communities around the nation. Hence, Pacaso has strong reasons to insist they are not a timeshare. >"Unlike a timeshare model, the co-owners that Pacaso serves collectively own real estate, not time," says Ellen Haberle, Director of Community & Government Relations for Pacaso. ^^cool story bro. Except shared deeded ownership already exists in timeshare land, and you own a portion of the PROPERTY, not time. I can't tell if they're actually ignorant to what a timeshare is, or just hoping the judge is.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  If you don't want shared ownership for properties in your area - then advocate for the local government to buy out all of the properties... but that would be shared ownership of all properties. Imposing restrictions on forms of ownership is in itself a form of forced shared ownership.(If someone is going to tell me that I cannot sell my house to whoever I choose to, then I do not outright own my house)
  - tw04 5y ago
    So if I don’t want a chemical plant built on the property behind my house, I should advocate for the government to buy all the land rather than have zoning laws? That’s ridiculous. Nobody is telling you who you can sell your house to, they’re telling the person buying the house what they can do with it. That already exists basically everywhere.
    - JAlexoid 5y ago
      Yes, you should. And preferably, you should advocate on buying out that land and decide what to do with it. Otherwise you're free to sue the chemical plant for any chemical smells and damages. So if I want to sell my house to an LLC - I'm not allowed. Therefore your claim is factually false. Making my ownership just non-existent.
trenning 5y ago
> They imagined endless parties, noise, and cars overflowing their cul-de-sac. They worried those staying at "Chardonnay" would drive too fast and fail to heed local concerns about wildfires and droughts. But, most of all, they feared the Pacaso house and more like it would destroy their sense of community and turn their neighborhood into an "adult Disneyland." We're not NIMBYs but don't come around here with your time share house! This company is getting weird attention because it's just a time share. It's not even as bad as those landlords that run Airbnb flop houses. These people at least have skin in the game for their house and neighborhood. What a confusing article.
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  >It's not even as bad as those landlords that run Airbnb flop houses. And those Airbnb landlords aren't as bad as slum lords, who aren't as bad as the people running tenements a hundred years ago. But so what? They're still bad.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > We're not NIMBYs but don't come around here with your time share house! Do they claim not to be NIMBYs? Seems like they are absolutely making that claim and they are happy about it.
dsalzman 5y ago
My parents did a similar model with 3 other families in CO in the early 2000's. If the model works for you - great, but you don't need a VC backed startup to organize and manage it for you. The key to these "co-share" models is liking your other partners in the LLC. Pacaso's model seems to restrictive and expensive for their target market.
- gorbachev 5y ago
  > you don't need a VC backed startup to organize and manage it for you You do, if the company's business plan is to blatantly ignore laws about timeshares and short-term rentals being illegal in areas where they're acquiring real estate.
pkdpic_y9k 5y ago
I love the founders inspirational story beginning of "When my wife and I bought our second home in lake tahoe..." (paraphrase)
- ddaschain 5y ago
  lmao
ttul 5y ago
Where I live, there are various discounts on property taxes and transfer fees if you buy a house as an individual. If a corporation buys the same house, it pays much more. IMHO if this type of ownership isn’t desired, local governments just need to tweak the taxation to make it at least be much more expensive.
ohyes 5y ago
So, if I buy every share in one of these house LLCs, can I do what I will with the house? (I.E. ending the relationship with Pacaso, doing major renovation, changing the terms of the agreement). If so, what happens if I just buy 51%? It seems that the argument against being a timeshare is that it is structured in a legally different way, where Pacaso itself does not own the house anymore, they just collect a monthly fee similar to a condo association. This seems like really, the ultimate in rent-seeking. I'm going to sell something and force you to continue paying me for it, until you sell it to some other poor sucker. It seems like the obvious move would be to acquire a controlling share and vote Pacaso out, then start issuing new shares with your controlling ownership to pay for maintenance fees or any other incidental costs of the house. Continue issuing shares until the other owners are diluted enough to own like, < 1 day a year, buy them out for cheap... It seems like the only way for Pacaso to guard against this would be to retain a controlling ownership, at which point they are much closer to being a time-share.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  You know, owning 51% of these and screwing the minority out of their share is a great strategy with plenty of wholesome American values-slash-jurisprudence on your side. In Salyer v. Tulare the Supreme Court said as long as JG Boswell owned the majority of the flood control district it was A-OK for him to just destroy the farms of the minority owners. You could make a lot of money this way.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  They could have put things into the incorporation documents. It's not a secret, what you're signing up-to. They don't need to retain any controlling ownership.
  - ohyes 5y ago
    Agreed. I would be very interested in reading an example of Pacaso's LLC incorporation documents. I would expect some sort of ongoing property management contract between Pacaso and the LLC, which I wouldn't expect to be indefinite or impossible to change via vote.
- 5y ago
srswtf123 5y ago
Ah yes, the legendary honesty, integrity, and forthrightness of Silicon Valley, and Corporate America in general. My father, an ex-Navy man, pointedly asked me once: “why do you want your own country to lose?” I don’t! I want us to be honest in our success, not smug while saying “if it isn’t illegal it must be OK!”. The solution to this could be teaching ethics at all levels of education.
asciimov 5y ago
Residential homes need to be left to the locals, not for vacation rentals, nor timeshares, nor hotels. A house next to me was a popular AirBnb for two years, being rented out 6-8 times a month. It was awful to essentially be living next to a hotel. You can have all the rules you want, but vacationers never care about the rules as they will be out of there before they face any consequences. I wonder how these people would feel if the homes next to them suddenly became hotels with new strange people living there every week.
boulos 5y ago
The distinction seems to be that there are two flavors of timeshare: shared deeded ownership and shared lease ownership interest [1]. The second one (leasing) is just the "right to time" and a separate company owns the property. Pacaso is more like the first variant, except the company argues that they don't sell time (they sell 1/8th shares, while a regular time share might have split up deeded ownership into 52 shares where each gets you a week). I would assume the law in St Helena deals with both classes of timeshare structure. Pacaso's argument then boils down to 8 != 52 (loosely). That's not a convincing argument for "we're not a timeshare". Edit to add: the one wrinkle is that many buildings in San Francisco and New York are co-ops with a similar "you actually buy shares not the unit" structure. But even then, a single housing unit isn't divided. (And to be clear, I'm not taking a position on the rights or wrongs here, I was just curious to remind myself what the "definition" of a timeshare was) [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/buying-timeshare-pros-cons-form-ownership.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/buying-timeshare-pro...
nonameiguess 5y ago
I can actually see this not really being timeshares. I'd like to see statistics on how frequently the fractional owners actually bother to occupy the houses during their allotted time at all. This feels more like an attempt to allow people to speculate in an overheated housing market in neighborhoods well above their price range, expanding the buyer pool for luxury housing beyond the small number of people who can actually afford luxury housing. That, of course, has the potential to be much worse than timeshares. Instead of just being a stupid purchase locking people into a single vacation destination at a single time every year, it dumps more money into a real estate bubble that is eventually going to pop again. But this time, instead of roping pension funds into buying fractional shares of a mortgage, it's just roping individuals who won't get bailouts when this all comes crashing down and the founders are laughing their asses off on an island wiping their asses with $100 bills. Get in fast and get out, I guess, because a whole lot of sorry fools are going to be left holding bags of worthless rocks when the Fed raises interest rates by 0.5% and the free mortgage frenzy market panics when we find out how many people can really afford even 1/8 of a mansion.
- ghaff 5y ago
  The thought occurred to me but if I were going to dump $600K into real estate I don't think I'd do it in a house with a doubtless expensive management company in a somewhat unusual very high end fractional ownership scheme that would seem to make value rather speculative versus a regular purchase.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
Ugh, this activates visceral dislike in me. I dislike the corporation ignoring local laws and ordinances, I dislike the extremely wealthy neighbors throwing up tons of signs around the now poorer peoples' domicile in their perfect community, and I dislike the potential for 8 people to get screwed by a bubble. Lastly, is it wasteful that people pay 600k for a month and a half of luxury housing per year? To me, That's so exorbitant. I worry that humans are constantly chasing a bigger better lifestyle, neglecting sitting down and noticing how great their actual life already is.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > I worry that humans are constantly chasing a bigger better lifestyle, neglecting sitting down and noticing how great their actual life already is. There is certainly a "keeping up with the joneses" aspect to this particular issue, but thank god people still wanted bigger and better for the last century or else most homes wouldn't have electricity and running water and countless other modern luxuries we take for granted.
disqard 5y ago
Buying one of 6 town houses (aka "row houses") constructed by razing an existing SFR is like Space-Division Multiplexing. Buying into one of these "1/8 ownership" deals sounds like Time-Division Multiplexing... aka a time-share.
technotarek 5y ago
Wasn’t there a show HN for a YC startup with the same idea earlier this week?
- npongratz 5y ago
  Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379
newbie789 5y ago
> "Unlike a timeshare model, the co-owners that Pacaso serves collectively own real estate, not time," … well that actually seems like a somewhat interesting business mod— > If you buy a share in a house, you're able to stay in it 44 nights per year in increments that can't exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. Oh, hmmm, it’s not a timeshare, it’s something completely different that they just invented. Fascinating!
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > well that actually seems like a somewhat interesting business mod— That's not a new idea either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust
madengr 5y ago
What if I buy a share and use it for a porn studio?
benatkin 5y ago
I checked the listings and one of them is in La Quinta, CA. Should be interesting if the residents there put up a fight like those in Napa. "We aren't that La Quinta!" (Large hotel chain in the US.)
luckyorlame 5y ago
poor rich people
peter303 5y ago
I live near and visit Aspen often. Many of their properties are occupied as little as a month a year- a period around July 4 and another around News Years. Their uber-wealthy owners have no great interest in monetizing the unused 90% of the time.
Traster 5y ago
It's stories like this that make me think we should just have a regulator who can come along and basically go "Nope, not Tech, just 'regulatory innovation', here's 5 new regulations that explicitly make this illegal"

125 points by js2 5y ago

Zelphyr 5y ago

I remember when technology solved real problems for real people. It wasn't that long ago. Now, we have this nonsense.

bhhaskin 5y ago
Like what?
- mbreese 5y ago
  I’m hungry, but I’m stuck at a desk with a computer and a T1 line. https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html https://www.pizzahut.com/assets/pizzanet/home.html Side note: not too long after the PizzaNet site, I would often order pizza from a computer lab at the end (ahem) of class so that it was waiting for me by the time I walked home. A critical problem for grad students.
  - refurb 5y ago
    If only there was a way to transmit my voice to the company to place the order.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      That would still count as technology, though.
- pyrale 5y ago
  Well, a recent arn-editing technology helped produce vaccines in record time to fight a global pandemic, for instance. If you want something closer to computers, https://covidtracker.fr/ https://covidtracker.fr/ set up a site to help following epidemic data as well as a site to get a vaccine appointment more easily. The kicker? It's just people using technology to solve a problem, there's no sales afterthought, no business plan, no grift involved.
JAlexoid 5y ago
A) They're not a tech company, as many people love to claim for investors these days. B) They are, however, solving someone's problem. Just because you don't share the same desires, doesn't mean that they're not addressing someone's need/want. C) Technology still solves a lot of "real" problems, but we have enough of it to solve a lot of frivolous things. (it would be funny if you work for FB, Twitter or tiktok... while writing this message)

reacharavindh 5y ago

Oh the AirBnB of home ownership. As it sounds, they are one regulation/ruling away from going bankrupt. Silicon Valley is full of Snake Oil buyers. I wish I had the tenacity to sell some.

kortex 5y ago
> As it sounds, they are one regulation/ruling away from going bankrupt. I can't wait. I'm sure it'll move with all the haste of government bureaucracy, but the sooner this gets shut down, the better. This is inevitably going to entangle tons of people who don't know better or think they can make a buck. It's a recipe for creating legal rats nests. No (with a material interest) wins. I don't even think the banks win. Early investors will make out like bandits. People with purely fiscal interests will largely win (some will get hosed). Equity owners will lose. Information-poor decision makers will lose. Prospective buyers in the neighborhood will probably see collateral damage.
- reacharavindh 5y ago
  It is a con job. In some sense, it is Darwinism for people who choose to invest in them I guess? But, it’s all about whether they can jump before the ship sinks.

ramesh31 5y ago

Leave it to SV startups to reinvent the timeshare.

SilasX 5y ago
Yep: >>To make second home ownership possible for more people — and, of course, make money — Pacaso uses a "fractional home ownership" model. They buy a house, lightly refurbish it, furnish it and then create an LLC for it. They then divvy up ownership of this corporatized house into eight fractions and sell those shares on their website. >>If you buy a share in a house, you're able to stay in it 44 nights per year, in increments that can't exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. Edit: Ah, and if you read further, it’s an attempt to get around the regulations and taxes on short term rentals: >>The county, Brad says, had designated their neighborhood an "exclusion zone," which bans Airbnb-style short-term rentals to preserve the "residential character" of communities. But Pacaso argues that their clients are not short-term renters. They are co-owners of an LLC. This also means they don't have to pay the typical taxes on short-term rentals.
schnevets 5y ago
Specifically to reinvent the timeshare while celebrating the purchase of a Lake Tahoe vacation home. I know it takes a certain level of delusion to become an entrepreneur, but things just seem to get more and more absurd.
ThePadawan 5y ago
Hey, at least they avoided calling it a timeshare, so customers have a harder time seeing that there's no significant difference. Now juicers, on the other hand...

iso1210 5y ago

So a timeshare?

Finnucane 5y ago
Basically. Obviously, assigning ownership of a house to an LLC is not a new thing either. It is a traditional method for skeezy landlords and the wealthy to hide the identity of the actual owners.

kortex 5y ago

Do you want the ease of timesharing, the convenience of homeowner associations, the security of subprime mortgage bundling, the property-value-normalizing aspect of AirBnB, and the totally-not-bubbly aspect of MLMs? Boy, do I have a bridge^W unicorn for you! Edit: actually this probably is a fantastic company to invest in, precisely because humans are terrible and I have zero hope in our collective decision-making ability, especially in light of short-term profits.

metalliqaz 5y ago
the crazy thing is, I'm pretty sure there are people that would jump on that first sentence.
- kortex 5y ago
  I'm sure. Timeshares are a thing. Juicero was a thing. MLMs and myriad other scammy things continue to be things despite a ton of outcry against them. Everyone thinks they won't be the one left holding the bag.

impostervt 5y ago

Seems very similar to this other, recently launched y-combinator company, Ancana: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379

spamizbad 5y ago

Seems like a "modernized" approach to timeshares, likely targeted towards cosmopolitan millennials. But I could be missing something.

codingdave 5y ago

As easy as it is to mock these guys for re-inventing timeshares, it does pose interesting legal questions on... Nope, no, sorry, I really am trying to come up with a substantive discussion point, but this is literally just timeshares. Timeshares do have value if you truly want to spend your vacation every year in the same place at the same time, but that is such a rare desire that most people end up avoiding them like the plague. I'm not seeing anything of interest here at all from a business perspective, just a few people re-hashing old ideas and ticking off their neighbors.

Lazare 5y ago
Old-school timeshare companies sometimes tried to organise "swaps", which somewhat solves the "every vacation at the same place" issue if it works, which, anecdotally, it almost never did. Still, it was a selling point. I suppose nothing would stop you from doing something similar with Pacaso, but it seems they haven't got a first party solution yet. Which is amusing, because it is one place where some technology might help.
- dspillett 5y ago
  My old boss often swapped his family's holiday timeshare with other options with no hassle. Though he had a rather expensive option to start with (five star, gold season, …) so most swaps were effectively downgrades, maybe it is much more problematic to switch sideways (or near impossible upwards).
tantalor 5y ago
Pacaso: > co-owners collectively own real estate, not time Also Pacaso: > Your access depends on the number of shares you own. Each share includes 44 stay nights, and they are tracked on a 365-day basis. https://www.pacaso.com/faq/scheduling https://www.pacaso.com/faq/scheduling
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Ah, but see, you own a -share- in the real estate, and the time is just a bonus that's included! After all, if you owned all the shares, you'd be able to stay in it all you wanted! eyeroll

Lazare 5y ago

Confusing headline. The story seems to be: There's a new startup called Pacaso selling timeshares. Like most people who sell timeshares, they loudly claim they aren't timeshares at all. Unlike most people who sell timeshares, they also ignore all laws against timeshares. Because we live in the dumbest timeline, because they claim to be a tech company and not a timeshare company, this means they are now worth a billion dollars. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; timeshare promoters are well known for sleazy tactics and lies, so... (Mind you, they might well be an unusually good timeshare company, if you actually like timeshares for some reason.)

game_the0ry 5y ago
Thanks for the tl;dr. I love NPR, but this click-bait title rubs me the wrong way. Actually the whole article rubs me the wrong way. I wonder if Pacaso paid the writer and this is really just marketing disguised as news. Ugh, NPR, why?
- qzw 5y ago
  NPR tries too hard to come across as neutral, responsible journalists sometimes. Once in a while I'd like them to just call something bullshit outright. But I guess that's what got us to this age of incivility, so maybe NPR's way is better.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    The best way to deal with BS is to not cover it at all. However controversy is a story that sells, so even seemingly neutral journalists will manufacture controversy just to get a story to be neutral about. You see it in all the vaccines stories that manufactures anti-vax sentiment in various groups.
qzw 5y ago
Title of pitch deck: Uber for Timeshares
maxsilver 5y ago
> Because we live in the dumbest timeline, because they claim to be a tech company and not a timeshare company, this means they are now worth a billion dollars. Well, we let the taxi service pretend to be not-a-taxi, and get away with it. We let the hotel service pretend to be not-a-hotel, and get away with it. Since no one is enforcing any reasonable rule of law, it's only a matter of time until 100% of all businesses follow suit. "We're not a hospital, we're a healthcare sharing service". "We're not a restaurant, we're a meal sharing experience". etc.

stopnamingnuts 5y ago

Clearly there are numerous markets supported by this model so I'm an outlier. My wife and I have considered fractional ownership of boats and vacation properties on several occasions. The things that turn me off every time is the inability to put a nail in a wall if I feel like it and the hassle overhead involved. I want to be able to whistle my dog into the car, hop in and go without having to coordinate with anybody else, knowing I have a toothbrush at my getaway spot.

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bombcar 5y ago
Things like AirBNB have really put the nail in the coffin for timeshares, why do something complicated when you can just rent a house for a month at the time you want? Similar things happen with boats, easier to rent when you need than try to fractionally own. It sometimes works with small planes, but often those are set up like a "rental" where all renters collectively "own" the little company that owns the plane.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  The amount of planning you already need to do to fly a plane makes shared ownership of a plane makes sense. And to be fair, a lot of the clubs will do shared ownership of a fleet of planes. Not just one.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Yeah, and over time the significant costs of plane ownership are directly tied to "runtime" on the engine - so a plane that's not being "rented" doesn't cost a ton to keep on the flight-line.
vidarh 5y ago
For me, to make a timeshare-like thing work, I think I'd need to be the owner with someone taking the hassle out of renting out access parts of the year, and repackaging financing around that. With respect to the toothbrush in your getaway spot, I sometimes wonder if there'd be a market for someone arranging picking up, storing and delivering luggage on demand. E.g. I might give up on owning if I can pick a flat to rent in a region I'd like to keep coming back to, and step on a plane with no luggage, knowing that when I got there, a chest with whatever I left behind last time had been cleaned, packaged up and stored and brought to the next place. Coming somewhere and having my clothes ready and waiting, and not have to thin about packing would be fantastic. You can get people to handle forwarding of your stuff from home, but that's complex and expensive. Of you come back to the same area or city regularly, then storage for a cubic meter or so of luggage with local-ish pickup and delivery a few times a year might well be reasonably cheap to operate.

MPSimmons 5y ago

> To make second home ownership possible for more people... Actual LOL. This is no different than Las Vegas time share scams. I hate HOAs with a passion, but in this case, any HOA would prevent this.

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ohgreatwtf 5y ago

if you are not going to live in a home at least 150 days a year you shouldn’t be able to buy it and that’s final

slang800 5y ago

Owning a "share" in one of these "house-companies" sounds like a nightmare. If you want to sell it off, you have to find someone who's willing to buy 1/8th of a house, or buy out 7 other owners to sell the house normally.

Ekaros 5y ago
I just see way too many issues with maintenance and renovations and so on. Majority has to agree to these. Living in country where housing companies is standard model for apartments there is enough horror stories of smaller ones where old people save money and forgo things costing lot more in long run... At least there you can do most things inside the appartment you control.

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Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

The "haha, this really is timeshare" comments on this and on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 are missing the point. Let me tell you why, with an example from a niche I've been involved in for 25 years; the 250-year old inland waterways of the UK. Shared ownership is big business on the UK canals. A new narrowboat costs £100k+, and unless you're living afloat, most people only spend a few weeks on it every year. It makes a lot of sense, then, to share with other like-minded people: you get the same amount of holiday for a fraction of the cost. Traditional timeshare narrowboats exist too. But the model is very different, and much more like the "timeshare" you'd think of with villas/resorts/etc. You pay some sort of upfront cost and some sort of subscription to the timeshare company, in return for which they promise to give you some benefits. But with timeshare, it's all a contractual relationship with the timeshare company; you don't own any part of the boat, and if they go bankrupt, you're screwed. That's not what narrowboat shared ownership is. With shared ownership, you literally do own a 1/12th share of the boat. Once you and your fellow co-owners have bought it, the boat belongs entirely to you. You probably pay some sort of service charge to the company for co-ordinating bookings (arguments over school holidays are common), servicing, and so on. But the boat is yours. And this was proved c. 2008. The two biggest shared ownership companies, OwnerShips and Challenger Syndicateships, both went bust in short order. Both had over-expanded: forays into the French canal market, ambitious luxury boats which went over budget, and just plain avarice on the part of the founders. But in both cases, the boat sharers retained ownership of their boats. Some incidental service fees and associated funds held by the companies were lost, but the asset remained untouched. Those boats are still out there, still in shared ownership, and often with service/arrangement fees being paid to another company - because since you own the boat, you can just up sticks and deal with another company if you like, or none at all. Contrast with timeshare. If a timeshare company goes bust you have no recourse. You don't own the boat/apartment/whatever. You don't own anything. So please, less of the "this is just reinventing timeshare". It's a proven model, it works, and good luck to them. Edit: a couple of examples: https://www.bcbm.co.uk https://www.bcbm.co.uk, http://www.carefreecruising.com http://www.carefreecruising.com.

lostcolony 5y ago
It's a proven model for non-essential items that people don't use all the time. Which housing isn't. Hence why there's the community outrage and legal wrangling.

xt00 5y ago

So super mockable company but in many vacation communities some old folks die and pass on their nice house on the lake to their kids. So say 3 kids own the property now. So if timeshares are banned in that area I guess you would say those people need to not share it and force one family member to buy the others out or something? Or they would then need to sell the property I guess. Basically just throwing it out there that many of these houses end up being used by families and often essentially it’s co-owned and timeshared by multiple people —-but because they are the kids of the rich folks that used to live there then is ok I guess. Not talking about a red herring I’m talking about the actual reality that I’m aware of in multiple vacation communities I’ve visited.

ghaff 5y ago
In the Northeast US, it's not unusual to have some "summer cottage" or other large property that's been passed down through generations and is now jointly owned and used by a ton of grandchildren, cousins, and second cousins. I stayed in one a few weeks ago.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  That's what's called NIMBYism. It seems to be much more prevalent farther west. California seems to be the crown jewel for them.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I wouldn't never get involved with such thing. I'm glad that my parents got out of all of them they inherited, one is not really maintained, one is now filled with junk though maintained and last one was some land on an island in next country, meaning passing over sea twice... I do understand some level of attachment, but unless all owners agree on what to do there can be many headaches...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    And in fact, the owners sold the smaller house to one of the family members and the larger house which is split among something like 27 owners is now up for sale for something like $6million. As I wrote elsewhere I decided not to split my dad's house with my brother. Just seemed like too many opportunities for conflict. I'd rather just go up now and then when it's available.

cwp 5y ago

Having a website doesn't make you a tech company.

tw04 5y ago

So... timeshares with an app, but they're suing to not be classified as a timeshare because nobody wants them in their neighborhoods and are thus banned. They can't actually explain how they aren't a timeshare, other than "trust us we aren't and unicorn disruption!" >Potentially even more damaging to Pacaso's ambitions, however: timeshares are banned in many vacation communities around the nation. Hence, Pacaso has strong reasons to insist they are not a timeshare. >"Unlike a timeshare model, the co-owners that Pacaso serves collectively own real estate, not time," says Ellen Haberle, Director of Community & Government Relations for Pacaso. ^^cool story bro. Except shared deeded ownership already exists in timeshare land, and you own a portion of the PROPERTY, not time. I can't tell if they're actually ignorant to what a timeshare is, or just hoping the judge is.

JAlexoid 5y ago
If you don't want shared ownership for properties in your area - then advocate for the local government to buy out all of the properties... but that would be shared ownership of all properties. Imposing restrictions on forms of ownership is in itself a form of forced shared ownership.(If someone is going to tell me that I cannot sell my house to whoever I choose to, then I do not outright own my house)
- tw04 5y ago
  So if I don’t want a chemical plant built on the property behind my house, I should advocate for the government to buy all the land rather than have zoning laws? That’s ridiculous. Nobody is telling you who you can sell your house to, they’re telling the person buying the house what they can do with it. That already exists basically everywhere.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    Yes, you should. And preferably, you should advocate on buying out that land and decide what to do with it. Otherwise you're free to sue the chemical plant for any chemical smells and damages. So if I want to sell my house to an LLC - I'm not allowed. Therefore your claim is factually false. Making my ownership just non-existent.

trenning 5y ago

> They imagined endless parties, noise, and cars overflowing their cul-de-sac. They worried those staying at "Chardonnay" would drive too fast and fail to heed local concerns about wildfires and droughts. But, most of all, they feared the Pacaso house and more like it would destroy their sense of community and turn their neighborhood into an "adult Disneyland." We're not NIMBYs but don't come around here with your time share house! This company is getting weird attention because it's just a time share. It's not even as bad as those landlords that run Airbnb flop houses. These people at least have skin in the game for their house and neighborhood. What a confusing article.

cool_dude85 5y ago
>It's not even as bad as those landlords that run Airbnb flop houses. And those Airbnb landlords aren't as bad as slum lords, who aren't as bad as the people running tenements a hundred years ago. But so what? They're still bad.
rootusrootus 5y ago
> We're not NIMBYs but don't come around here with your time share house! Do they claim not to be NIMBYs? Seems like they are absolutely making that claim and they are happy about it.

dsalzman 5y ago

My parents did a similar model with 3 other families in CO in the early 2000's. If the model works for you - great, but you don't need a VC backed startup to organize and manage it for you. The key to these "co-share" models is liking your other partners in the LLC. Pacaso's model seems to restrictive and expensive for their target market.

gorbachev 5y ago
> you don't need a VC backed startup to organize and manage it for you You do, if the company's business plan is to blatantly ignore laws about timeshares and short-term rentals being illegal in areas where they're acquiring real estate.

pkdpic_y9k 5y ago

I love the founders inspirational story beginning of "When my wife and I bought our second home in lake tahoe..." (paraphrase)

ddaschain 5y ago
lmao

ttul 5y ago

Where I live, there are various discounts on property taxes and transfer fees if you buy a house as an individual. If a corporation buys the same house, it pays much more. IMHO if this type of ownership isn’t desired, local governments just need to tweak the taxation to make it at least be much more expensive.

ohyes 5y ago

So, if I buy every share in one of these house LLCs, can I do what I will with the house? (I.E. ending the relationship with Pacaso, doing major renovation, changing the terms of the agreement). If so, what happens if I just buy 51%? It seems that the argument against being a timeshare is that it is structured in a legally different way, where Pacaso itself does not own the house anymore, they just collect a monthly fee similar to a condo association. This seems like really, the ultimate in rent-seeking. I'm going to sell something and force you to continue paying me for it, until you sell it to some other poor sucker. It seems like the obvious move would be to acquire a controlling share and vote Pacaso out, then start issuing new shares with your controlling ownership to pay for maintenance fees or any other incidental costs of the house. Continue issuing shares until the other owners are diluted enough to own like, < 1 day a year, buy them out for cheap... It seems like the only way for Pacaso to guard against this would be to retain a controlling ownership, at which point they are much closer to being a time-share.

jeffbee 5y ago
You know, owning 51% of these and screwing the minority out of their share is a great strategy with plenty of wholesome American values-slash-jurisprudence on your side. In Salyer v. Tulare the Supreme Court said as long as JG Boswell owned the majority of the flood control district it was A-OK for him to just destroy the farms of the minority owners. You could make a lot of money this way.
JAlexoid 5y ago
They could have put things into the incorporation documents. It's not a secret, what you're signing up-to. They don't need to retain any controlling ownership.
- ohyes 5y ago
  Agreed. I would be very interested in reading an example of Pacaso's LLC incorporation documents. I would expect some sort of ongoing property management contract between Pacaso and the LLC, which I wouldn't expect to be indefinite or impossible to change via vote.
5y ago

srswtf123 5y ago

Ah yes, the legendary honesty, integrity, and forthrightness of Silicon Valley, and Corporate America in general. My father, an ex-Navy man, pointedly asked me once: “why do you want your own country to lose?” I don’t! I want us to be honest in our success, not smug while saying “if it isn’t illegal it must be OK!”. The solution to this could be teaching ethics at all levels of education.

asciimov 5y ago

Residential homes need to be left to the locals, not for vacation rentals, nor timeshares, nor hotels. A house next to me was a popular AirBnb for two years, being rented out 6-8 times a month. It was awful to essentially be living next to a hotel. You can have all the rules you want, but vacationers never care about the rules as they will be out of there before they face any consequences. I wonder how these people would feel if the homes next to them suddenly became hotels with new strange people living there every week.

boulos 5y ago

The distinction seems to be that there are two flavors of timeshare: shared deeded ownership and shared lease ownership interest [1]. The second one (leasing) is just the "right to time" and a separate company owns the property. Pacaso is more like the first variant, except the company argues that they don't sell time (they sell 1/8th shares, while a regular time share might have split up deeded ownership into 52 shares where each gets you a week). I would assume the law in St Helena deals with both classes of timeshare structure. Pacaso's argument then boils down to 8 != 52 (loosely). That's not a convincing argument for "we're not a timeshare". Edit to add: the one wrinkle is that many buildings in San Francisco and New York are co-ops with a similar "you actually buy shares not the unit" structure. But even then, a single housing unit isn't divided. (And to be clear, I'm not taking a position on the rights or wrongs here, I was just curious to remind myself what the "definition" of a timeshare was) [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/buying-timeshare-pros-cons-form-ownership.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/buying-timeshare-pro...

nonameiguess 5y ago

I can actually see this not really being timeshares. I'd like to see statistics on how frequently the fractional owners actually bother to occupy the houses during their allotted time at all. This feels more like an attempt to allow people to speculate in an overheated housing market in neighborhoods well above their price range, expanding the buyer pool for luxury housing beyond the small number of people who can actually afford luxury housing. That, of course, has the potential to be much worse than timeshares. Instead of just being a stupid purchase locking people into a single vacation destination at a single time every year, it dumps more money into a real estate bubble that is eventually going to pop again. But this time, instead of roping pension funds into buying fractional shares of a mortgage, it's just roping individuals who won't get bailouts when this all comes crashing down and the founders are laughing their asses off on an island wiping their asses with $100 bills. Get in fast and get out, I guess, because a whole lot of sorry fools are going to be left holding bags of worthless rocks when the Fed raises interest rates by 0.5% and the free mortgage frenzy market panics when we find out how many people can really afford even 1/8 of a mansion.

ghaff 5y ago
The thought occurred to me but if I were going to dump $600K into real estate I don't think I'd do it in a house with a doubtless expensive management company in a somewhat unusual very high end fractional ownership scheme that would seem to make value rather speculative versus a regular purchase.

Dumblydorr 5y ago

Ugh, this activates visceral dislike in me. I dislike the corporation ignoring local laws and ordinances, I dislike the extremely wealthy neighbors throwing up tons of signs around the now poorer peoples' domicile in their perfect community, and I dislike the potential for 8 people to get screwed by a bubble. Lastly, is it wasteful that people pay 600k for a month and a half of luxury housing per year? To me, That's so exorbitant. I worry that humans are constantly chasing a bigger better lifestyle, neglecting sitting down and noticing how great their actual life already is.

vineyardmike 5y ago
> I worry that humans are constantly chasing a bigger better lifestyle, neglecting sitting down and noticing how great their actual life already is. There is certainly a "keeping up with the joneses" aspect to this particular issue, but thank god people still wanted bigger and better for the last century or else most homes wouldn't have electricity and running water and countless other modern luxuries we take for granted.

disqard 5y ago

Buying one of 6 town houses (aka "row houses") constructed by razing an existing SFR is like Space-Division Multiplexing. Buying into one of these "1/8 ownership" deals sounds like Time-Division Multiplexing... aka a time-share.

technotarek 5y ago

Wasn’t there a show HN for a YC startup with the same idea earlier this week?

npongratz 5y ago
Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247379

newbie789 5y ago

> "Unlike a timeshare model, the co-owners that Pacaso serves collectively own real estate, not time," … well that actually seems like a somewhat interesting business mod— > If you buy a share in a house, you're able to stay in it 44 nights per year in increments that can't exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. Oh, hmmm, it’s not a timeshare, it’s something completely different that they just invented. Fascinating!

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> well that actually seems like a somewhat interesting business mod— That's not a new idea either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_investment_trust

madengr 5y ago

What if I buy a share and use it for a porn studio?

benatkin 5y ago

I checked the listings and one of them is in La Quinta, CA. Should be interesting if the residents there put up a fight like those in Napa. "We aren't that La Quinta!" (Large hotel chain in the US.)

luckyorlame 5y ago

poor rich people

peter303 5y ago

I live near and visit Aspen often. Many of their properties are occupied as little as a month a year- a period around July 4 and another around News Years. Their uber-wealthy owners have no great interest in monetizing the unused 90% of the time.

Traster 5y ago

It's stories like this that make me think we should just have a regulator who can come along and basically go "Nope, not Tech, just 'regulatory innovation', here's 5 new regulations that explicitly make this illegal"