Move Over, Pacaso. The Summer Home Experience is Here

You’ve likely already heard about Pacaso, the second home-buying startup launched by Zillow vet Spencer Rascoff and dotloop founder Austin Allison that offers fractional ownership and income potential to vacation home buyers. But what if you want to purchase your second home on your own? And what if you don’t want to deal with any of the pesky property management or leasing?

As second homebuying heats up with the summer temperatures, so has a new vacation home buying startup — Summer. It’s like Pacaso in that it helps streamline second home buying by offering specific properties with solid income potential with none of the hassles of property management and leasing. Where it differs is that Summer buyers will own the property in a partnership with the startup and they have three whole years to decide whether it’s right for them before going all-in on the property.

How it Works

Summer has a ready-to-buy inventory of second homes in select markets — the Hamptons, the Hudson Valley, Miami, Park City, etc. — or you can shop alongside an agent partner with Summer. Once you’ve chosen your location, buyers put down a refundable fee of 20 percent of the purchase price of the property and a monthly subscription fee based on the amount of time they want to spend in their second home and the peak seasons at the location.

Now, if you’re just planning to be a subscriber, then Summer pockets the proceeds from the rental while you’re not there. If you plan to buy — which you can choose to do at any time in the first three years of your subscription — Summer will put the entire down payment and half of the monthly subscription payments toward the home purchase. Don’t want to buy? Summer will refund your money down.

A New Product From Airbnb Alums

Summer, launched by Airbnb alums Paul Kromidas and Woods Buckley, has seven homes in four markets available. That’s a modest start from a startup with serious juice, but the organization could have the same measure of success as Rascoff’s Pacaso should the second home market continue its upward momentum.

From TechCrunch:

The company partners with lenders to handle home acquisition and has raised $13.4 million led by QED, with participation from Lightspeed Ventures, 1Sharpe Capital, First Minute Capital and others.

Kromidas and Buckley believe the greatest challenge to Summer is educating the market.

“When you talk to folks about their feelings on real estate dealings, there’s a lot of distrust,” said Kromidas. “They always have a story about a bad broker or a bad deal and there’s always this ‘pull my hair out’ sort of moment. When folks first hear about us, it sounds a little too good to be true, which doesn’t necessarily help the trust hurdle. But then, when you peel back the onion, you start to realize it’s all of the best parts of it without any of the negatives. And as folks learn more and more, this light bulb moment starts to happen and they realize ‘hey, this is actually a good deal for me.’”