Fractional Home Ownership—Smart Investment Or Real Estate Scam?

If you’ve been looking for a second home, vacation home, or pied a terre—you might have encountered an emerging trend called “fractional home ownership.” At an initial glance, it feels a bit like Timeshares 2.0—but it’s a different concept entirely.

“Fractional home ownership is a real estate model where multiple individuals or entities collectively own and share ownership rights to a single property,” says Whitney Curry, Chief Marketing Officer of Pacaso, which is a marketplace offering co-ownerships in forty locations with everything from beach front property in Malibu to ski houses in Vail. “Instead of one family owning 100 percent of a vacation home that they will use just a few weeks each year, co-ownership enables people to right-size their ownership to align with what they’ll actually use.”