Pacaso is turning houses into corporations
npr.org
npr.org
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.)
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.
If a team like that is wrong about something, it's not for lack of trying to be right.
I've never cared for the format. Just gimme the bullet points, save the snark.
But I've also understood that I'm not the audience. Leaning into civics and current events is a lot of work. And people are busy.
John Oliver, Michael Moore, John Steward, many others, are quite a bit more accessible for a wider audience. So they are a vital part of our public square.
TLDR: John Oliver is awesome.
Uber should not have been buying cars for their drivers... but if Uber is to be forced to have employee/employer relationships - then Uber's value of freedom to choose working hours goes out the window, as they now can mandate working hours... and surge capacity is literally annihilated.
I'm not (in these posts, I may elsewhere) passing judgement on why they did it and if it were right, only stating that it is what they did.
The US taxi system in most cities was an abusive cartel holding on to a market solely through a government protection racket, and that's the nice description of it. Uber and Lyft destroyed the cartels, delivering a far superior service.
As for the superior service, I'm not sure that will last once the VC funding runs out and these companies have to actually turn a profit. Uber/Lyft is MoviePass writ large.
So now I pay 3x more to have an experience often shittier than cabs.
Got out after 2 blocks (a few seconds after she hit “unpause”)
And were hailed as "disruptors."
Have you ever had to haggle about the cost of your trip with a taxi driver?
Have you ever ordered a taxi and one never showed up?
Have you ever missed your flight, because a taxi - that was scheduled to pick you up at 5AM just didn't arrive?
I used to do consulting work all over Europe and literally spent 5 years of my life flying every single week. Pre-Uber taxis were horrible! In fact, they still are!
Not to mention taxis refusing to serve minority neighborhoods. If you're actively preventing a significant proportion of your potential customers from using your service, you shouldn't be surprised if a competitor is able to swoop in and "disrupt" your business. (that's not to say Uber doesn't have their own problems with rideshare redlining, but they're certainly better than traditional taxi companies)
Airbnb provides a different service than a hotel.
Both of these narrowly scoped, heavily regulated antiquated services were failing to meet the needs of most, and the world is better that there are additional options.
Taxis and hotels are still there and still sucking, if you prefer those.
It's not that I always stay in a chain hotel either. Outside of metros, I'll definitely give B&Bs and Inns a look.
Beyond that, it means you might have loud neighbours you can't control or a constant traffic of visitors in your building. They are not regulated like hotels, nor taxed like them.
Staying in residential property, in residential districts is way preferable to me for my style of travel (3-6 weeks in a city at a time).
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.
More likely they want to find a way to circumvent short term rental laws and then charge a premium over Airbnb for short term rental access in locations that Airbnb cannot rent. On paper that company could be worth billions. Then they sell it before investors realize the legal tricks they used only work for a short while.
Turns out, though, that a neighborhood of (by definition) multi-millionaires can mount a more effective defense than the markets airbnb started in.
Can you elaborate why the app hints at this?
In Whistler, BC, such fractional ownership is common. And it’s true ownership on title, rather than a form of rental like a time share.
500K for basically an airbnb, where i have to pack all my stuff, to go there for a week, then pack stuff, to go home is pretty useless to me.
People have been doing informal versions of this for a long time.
ie, a well off family will have a second home, but it's actually shared between 6 families in the family (second generation) who use it in various ways. Grandparents go up, kids visit with grandkids, then kids and grandkids stay etc.
Boats are often bought in a partnership - and frankly it's more fun becuase your budget for ownership is literally 4x - so you can do / pay for whatever, cleaning, maintenance etc.
Various forms of fractional aircraft ownership.
Folks with money are not total idiots. A fixed asset sitting is a waste.
In the house case, you want a place that becomes a regular part of your routine, a place your kids know, a place your friends start to know. 1/4 ownership is not 1 week a year. It is months in the year. You know the local restaurants, the hikes and bike rides etc.
I've independently been sent hey, look at this place, from two different people now who are on this app. You can get a MUCH nicer place than you can get alone for $400K. A place you could have a big group over to visit etc, a place for families to get together.
You can also get a very nice place for 44 days in a year (the offer discussed in the article is 44 days, no more than 14 consecutively, first come first serve for timeslots) for $4k on a vacation rental site, have approximately as much say in how it's run, and have more choice over which days you spend there, and whether you spend more time there next year or not. Of course, you don't get a theoretical opportunity to sell appreciating property on at a profit which I'm sure the Pacaso sales team talks about a lot, but how real is that opportunity when most property investors and wealthy homebuyers are looking for whole houses, not a timeshare (and people who want timeshares are going to Pacaso.com to buy the new properties it takes a ~14% fee to subdivide and sell, not whoever's willing to shift the share you want rid of)
Sure, there's a real market for it, but there's a real market for other types of timeshare that sound like better (or less worse) deals...
Do you pay $3M or $500K. That is the question you need to ask. Is it worth $2.5M to have more than your standard locker of crap at the vacation house?
Even family houses - generally you need to keep your personal crap to a minimum, everything is shared. You can buy a bogie board for everyone, but the folks on here talking about how they need to fill a $3M 6 bedroom house with their personal crap - this is not for you. Most of us can get buy much more simply.
This is why I'm glad we can let market decide not folks on HN. Almost every neat thing, from iphone to this would just be poo poo'ed away.
Alternatively, renting or staying in a hotel/resort is _significantly_ cheaper than $500k, even amortized over 10 years. TBD how much you can sell your timeshare back for at the end, but I'd argue the risk + the significant upfront capital + not getting to put your crap in your expensive rental™ makes it a tough sell for all but a small niche.
>let market decide not folks on HN
I'd point out that a number of the threads on this are more upset that this seems to be a timeshare system that dodges regulations around timeshares, just as Uber is a cab system that dodges cab regulations and AirBnB is a BnB/home rental. It's more anger that these startups raise massive cash to distort the markets in ways that have some advantages but aren't always long-term positive, and it takes regulation too long to catch up. Comparing regulation dodging timeshares to iPhones feels disingenuous.
> There's a new startup (...) selling $Thing. (...) Unlike most people who sell $Thing, they also ignore all laws against $Thing. Because we live in the dumbest timeline, because they claim to be a tech company and not a $Thing company, this means they are now worth a billion dollars.
It's becoming a kind of a recurring pattern.
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?
You see it in all the vaccines stories that manufactures anti-vax sentiment in various groups.
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.
Everyone thinks they won't be the one left holding the bag.
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.
Joint ownership for much more than a very simple place invariably gets into at least some level of disagreement over things like maintenance and upgrades especially if not everyone is in the same place financially.
NIMBYs subverting these contracts makes things much worse.
If you buy a share in a property with the understanding that you have first-come-first-serve booking of timeslots - all other arrangements are based on good will alone.
That beats arguing in an extended family without set out rules.
Pacaso charges monthly fees for upkeep. What’s the difference?
This can also include improvements like wheelchair ramps, boat docks etc or even removal of things like TV service etc. Again it’s exactly what the group decides without excess or profit.
Second, if you and your friends are sharing a cabin in the woods, why would you need a cleaning company? Sure, if nobody used it for 6 months you might schedule something ahead of time, but it’s not like you trash your house evey day your there.
So if you wanted to bet on real estate in Sonoma going up but you don't have the funds to finance an entire property, this is a way to make that investment (just tell the lender that this is your "vacation house").
Of course that also brings up the question of how easy it'll be to find a buyer for your 12.5% of an LLC when the time comes for you to cash out.
People typically rent out investment properties. Its pretty rare to invest speculatively by just buy/hold without using the property.
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.
Plenty of people would be up for this imo.
The issue with timeshares is that at some point, someone's kids/friends will trash the house just before the next sharer moves in, and from that point any goodwill between the timesharers will be ruined.
I specifically decided not to jointly own my dad's house with my brother when it needed to be rebuilt after a fire. (He moved to a retirement community.) And it was definitely the right choice as there were definitely things we would have wanted to do differently.
Very soon it just makes sense to get a hotel, where you don't front out $100k just to walk in the door.
> 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.
eyeroll
Not rare among a certain wealthy, striving, social class. Not rare at all.
In some circles I intersect with (but do not belong to), the years, or decades your family has been part-time residents in a place is a factor in your self-image and/or place in the pecking order.
Aside from that, part of what I think is fueling this company's growth is that it's not about vacationing. It's about having a (another) pretty place to take your family for 2 months a year, wrapped up in a promise that it's a compelling real estate investment, so you're practically losing money if you don't buy now!
Unless the timeshare company even messes that up. Seen that happen to a few people.
Their timeshare options are all gone almost immediately when selecting them opens, oddly enough through a completely different points system that they have points through ... those locations are open.
>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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
And I think because seeing that, my initial suspicion is they really know their target market, or something, and I'm not it. Because the whole "[bought a house on lake Tahoe]...inspired about making the dream of second home ownership possible for more people"
Makes me think "wow, really? that's the narrative pitch?" But tbf I don't know how you go about pitching a second home without sounding like Marie Antoinette.
I do understand some level of attachment, but unless all owners agree on what to do there can be many headaches...
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.
Maybe allow families to share houses if there isn't a third party manager charging huge fees for its exclusive right to determine which person is permitted to access the house on which days...
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.
So sure, collect 100% of the shares and then dissolve the LLC - 51% won't do it. It's likely that Pacaso would actually appreciate you doing this, as it validates their investment proposition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In America we have rollerbag hell at the airport and people are terrified of checking their luggage.
What I'd like is more e.g. deciding I want to visit the French Riviera regularly (I live in London, 20 minutes by train from an airport with regular flights to Nice, and Nice airport is literally walking distance from the town centre, and I love the area), so I buy a chest w/storage there, bring clothes the first time and they pick it up at the end of my trip and hold on to it until I come back, and charges me a storage fee.
It's a niche service, but some places (like Nice) do have companies that specialise in maintaining and handling AirBnb rentals, so maybe it'd be a nice extra income for a company like that.
If I could get them to clean and iron my clothes as well, it'd be perfect. Arriving to have my luggage unpacked and ready, and just leaving it at the end of the trip would get me halfway to the benefits of owning a vacation property for small fraction of the cost.
I've actually contemplated contacting some of the property management companies in Nice to ask if they'd be willing to provide a service like that, even at a substantial premium to offer something bespoke...
If you're the entrepreneurial type... i think this and/or your parent comment are very compelling and i'd be interested (im in US not EU but still)
I suspect this is one of those things where you need a lot higher margin than you think to offset really high customer acquisition costs. You need to find people who believe they'll visit often, probably will visit less than they think, yet won't care too much about putting down 2k/year+ for the convenience, partly aspirationally.
A quick search shows storage units in Nice to stick with that, easily comes down to <8 euro month per cubic metre, btw., so it's certainly doable to make something like this into a relatively cheap subscription. The effort is in finding customers + signing up local partners to deliver.
There are although there might need to be someone on the other end to accept the delivery.
These are mostly for business purposes though. I looked into it once for a complicated mixed personal/business trip and, while I don't remember the numbers, it was fairly pricey for an individual especially if you get free luggage on your carrier.
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.
And to be fair, a lot of the clubs will do shared ownership of a fleet of planes. Not just one.
For me the thing that got me to briefly consider buying a vacation home was the flexibility in arrival/departure times and the corresponding advantage regarding traffic. At least in the DE-MD-VA-NC beaches where my family typically vacations, almost all rental houses are rented by the week, with either Saturday or Sunday as the arrival/departure day. Departure times are pretty strict (usually 10 or 11 am) as the place needs to be cleaned in time for the next week's rental. So everyone is on the road at once and traffic Saturday and Sunday during the day is just awful. The last time I drove from DC to the Outer Banks it took me a full 12 hours. I was so annoyed that at the end of the week, I left around midnight the night before scheduled departure, and I made it home in 6 hours. I made the return trip in half the time! If I owned the place, I could show up and leave whenever I felt like it (or not at all)!
But this? Spend $600K for 1/8 use of a house that you can't personalize in any way or, as you say, just use when you want to? Oh, and want to go somewhere else on vacation? Well, you already have this paid for property. Better go there.
Various investment vehicles are buying up houses all over the world.
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.
Do they claim not to be NIMBYs? Seems like they are absolutely making that claim and they are happy about it.
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.
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.
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.
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-pro...
… 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!
That's not a new idea either.
Buying into one of these "1/8 ownership" deals sounds like Time-Division Multiplexing... aka a time-share.
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, http://www.carefreecruising.com.
It's certainly true that the shared deed form has advantages (...it's also more expensive upfront, for obvious reasons), but it's not exactly novel.
> So please, less of the "this is just reinventing timeshare" It's a proven model, it works, and good luck to them.
I agree; I don't think they're reinventing anything. And it is a proven model...but I'd still call it a timeshare.
Which is classic NIMBYism
Just because I can't tell you exactly where the line is crossed from one to the other[1], doesn't mean a line isn't crossed.
[1] Just like nobody can tell you where a person goes from being a child to an adult responsible for their own decisions, but we draw arbitrary lines at 16, 18, 19, 21...
It's quite amusing to check out the wikipedia page on timeshares (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeshare), which goes into detail on the differences between timeshares which offer deeded ownership versus a contract giving you the right to use the underlying property.
But if you go to the fractional ownership page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_ownership) it spends ages going on smugly about how actually timeshares are strictly the contract type, and what sets fractional ownership apart is that you actually have a deed, and even claims that the popularity of the (cool and amazing) fractional ownership model is causing timeshares to try and rebrand themselves as fractional ownership. But the only citation is offers for that is a link back to the timeshare wikipedia page, which outrights contradicts that. Then it goes on to describe "private residence clubs" as a time of "fractional ownership" where in some cases you don't get a deed at all (directly contradicting the immediately previous section). Apparently the distinction is that if it sells for over $1k/square foot, it's a "private residence club" and thus fractional ownership and (nominally) "good", but if it's cheaper than that it's just a "destination club" and thus a timeshare and thus (nominally) "bad". And the only citation given for this is...a single timeshare consultant.
One of these pages is decent; the other seems to have been written by the timeshare industry for marketing purposes. :)
Which housing isn't. Hence why there's the community outrage and legal wrangling.
Now there's a strong argument that second home ownership should be restricted in some places, but that's orthogonal to whether the house is under shared or single ownership.
But purchasing a second home still makes it a home; you'll still live in it some part of the year.
This article is about rotating out who is living in it, making it no different than short term rentals or timeshares from the community perspective, and that's what I'm referring to. People don't want homes being owned and operated as rental businesses in their neighborhoods; they want people living in their neighborhoods. As evidenced by the exclusion zones, HOAs, etc, mentioned in the article. This is an attempt to circumvent those. So, fundamentally different than partial ownership of a boat as compared to a rental of a boat; no one is objecting to renting a boat on the UK canals.
tbf it's actually very hard to legally do regular rentals on UK canals as opposed to short term hires at vacation prices and ownership (fractional or otherwise).
But the fractional ownership schemes aren't rental rules evasion or selling the dreams of property appreciation, they're "you can get a 1/12 share for the one-off cost of a four week hire if you don't mind chipping in for 1/12 of the maintenance and mooring costs in future years"
Going the post-factum-legal-force route is hardly fair.
>>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.
Now juicers, on the other hand...
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)
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.
If you want something closer to computers, 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.