It’s hard to be in the business of convincing people that they deserve a vacation. Convincing people to share a vacation home and enjoy it at the same time can be deceptively difficult.
Getaway — unlike another venture-backed Getaway, which sells getaways to tiny cabins in the middle of nature — wants to make it easier for people to rent and invest in luxury real estate. The company founded by Ali Nichols and co Amr Shafiq, he wants to do it all. It has raised $4.4 million from Cowboy Ventures, XYZ Ventures and Night Ventures, as well as $1.5 million in debt financing.
The platform, boasting the tagline “Investments with Vision,” will soon go public and plans to launch its first investment offering to investors later this month, pending SEC approval.
“We’re actually buying properties,” Nichols said. Everything we post on our website, we are confident because we use our own financing to close the house, get it ready to rent, and become an active Airbnb or VRBO property. I’m making money. Then she continues, members of the startup sell off ownership; As the Getaway Company buys shares in the property, so there is “common skin” in the game. “Over time, our goal is from a financial standpoint where we can get the house under contract and people can invest at that point and then we’ll close,” she added.
It’s not the first startup to try to facilitate standalone vacation rentals. Pacasso, founded by former Zillow executives, helps people buy and co-own luxury vacation homes, and has raised more than $1.5 billion in venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase. Pacasso is one of the fastest growing companies to become a unicorn or valued at over $1 billion. hardly ever.
Getaway’s co-founders say users can invest in Getaway property starting at $1,000 per ownership share, while Pacasso can spend anywhere from $400,000 to $3 million to buy ⅛ of a property. Owners are “strictly prohibited” from renting out parts of the Pacasso property, a Pacasso spokesperson confirmed in an email. Vacation properties, meanwhile, are active vacation rentals that generate recurring passive income.
Additionally, importantly, Getaway allows owners to access discounted rates across their entire portfolio of homes. The bottom line is that you have to pay to stay in a partially owned home.
Here’s another startup in the space, which wants to make investing in vacation rentals as easy as investing in stocks. Unlike Pacasso and Gateway, he’s trying to raise the financial standard of home ownership here, not the vacation.
The runaway race wants to be everything, everywhere, all at once. Nichols explains that they want to be a cross between, “Your experience ends with the dollars you put in and you hope to see it grow on the app” and Pacasso, “travel where it’s not really a financial investment, but an investment and spending time in beautiful homes.”
People want access to these beautiful homes and so our approach is how to take that right and make it more accessible and meaningful,” she said. “If I look at all the seas of competitors that I can put $1,000 in and all things being equal, really enjoy the portfolio of homes around the country and soon to be the world, hopefully, it’s huge. Benefit from a consumer perspective. The company currently has two homes, one in Scottsdale and one in Miami, and will soon close one in Palm Springs.
“It seems like there’s a new safe investment for consumers every day,” says Shafiq. “How to cut through the noise and make sure you reach the right person [opportunity] It would be fun, but there is an interest generation angle and a customer acquisition angle as well.
Building a wealth opportunity and building an experience for a broad consumer market has its challenges. Time will tell if Getaway can get there.
