There’s a stranger in the house. They’re walking up your stairs. They’re in your bedroom! But we’re not in the 1980s, and this isn’t a knock-off version of that old “the call’s coming from inside the home” urban legend. Rather, this is the world of second home sharing, where holidaymakers pool their resources in order to make the most of an otherwise empty holiday house, be it for cash or time in kind spent at someone else’s second home. The stranger, in this case, is a co-owner of your holiday getaway, or else they’re staying there, because you’re staying at theirs.
Recent years have seen criticism levelled at second homes and buy-to-let holiday rentals in areas where these proliferate, prompting everything from planned stamp duty increases on UK second homes to protesters spraying holidaymakers with water pistols in Barcelona’s touristy Ramblas district. As such, the time to make second homes more efficient has rarely seemed riper – and there are broadly two ways that sharing can happen.
The first, perhaps more traditional method, is through shared ownership. In other words, you band together with a group of like-minded people to buy a house – or indeed several – in a place where you otherwise couldn’t afford to own a second home.
Taken to its logical example, this can mean buying into anything up to half a dozen villas, apartments or other properties around the world. August, for example, is a shared home company founded in 2018 which allows families or individuals to buy into several tiers or “Collections” of four or five second homes, depending on their lifestyle and desired price point. So, if you drop €700,000 for access to their Premium Collection, you gain access to second homes in the south of France, Tuscany, Mallorca, the French Alps and the Cotswolds – but you share along with 20 other co-owners. August’s Pied à Terre Collection is their most (relatively) financial accessible: €365,000 will buy you a share in five two-bedroom apartments in London, Paris, Rome, Cannes and Barcelona, also shared between 21 owners. Prime, their latest and most expensive set, costs a cool €1.48 million to buy into and encompasses four homes in – you can probably guess by now – the south of France, Tuscany, Mallorca and the French Alps. This time, you’ll only co-own with 15 other investors, and August says that these boast “exclusive interior elements, amenities and region-specific features”, such as inclusive invitations to Wimbledon and other local events.
These houses and flats are undeniably beautiful, all rustic whitewashed stone and cool plaster where rural, and chic and sleek where urban. In Tuscany, a four-bedroom farmhouse overlooks a private pool and terrace below, while the Cotswolds bolthole embodies Aga-heated comfort and The Holiday quaintness. The catch, of course, is that these aren’t entirely your own houses – they are shared, and therefore decisions about their decoration and upkeep are also shared. Or, more accurately, they are delegated, to an in-house design team who appear from August’s promotional imagery to do their best to cater to inoffensive but luxurious taste. This makes sense; you’ll never manage to reach a consensus among 21 different owners as to how to decorate a house, after all. But it also seems like you miss out on one of the joys of owning a second home, which is stuffing it full of all the weird, old and embarrassing possessions that don’t quite fit in your first, real home. August partners with several high-end interiors brands, including Schumacher 1889, Ginori and Frette, the latter of which is touted in publicity materials as “the textile brand behind some of the most celebrated hotel experiences, including the Ritz-Carlton”. Whether or not resembling a luxury hotel is a design strength is something we’ll leave you to decide.
The second typical way to share second homes is through home exchanges – in which you swap unused time in your already-existing second home for time in other people’s. It’s basically a very big, very luxurious lending club that leverages the same idea that a company like August does: that many of these amazing houses are unoccupied for much of the year, and that a broker can fix that inefficiency.
At the top end of this industry is ThirdHome, whose bank of exchangeable second homes includes more than 14,000 different properties. These are rated by the company according to value, with a minimum accepted value of $500,000 (which seems funny, because a two-bedroom flat on a council estate in London’s Zone 2 might be worth £550,000… but I’m not sure I can see it being happily exchanged for a farmhouse in backwoods Maine, say, with a similar value, or a sun-kissed villa outside Naples); the owners then put their house on offer for as few or as many weeks of the year as they like, to be booked by others in the ThirdHome programme. The more weeks offered (and the more desirable those weeks, like Christmas or Easter), the more credit earned for one’s own trips to similarly priced second homes.
ThirdHome boasts that their club offerings include castles, ranches, yachts and private estates. It’s perhaps not a surprise that the company recently introduced a new tier of property – their most exclusive – called The Reserve, to cater for second homes worth $10 million or more (the average value of a ThirdHome stay is apparently about $2.4 million, or £1.9 million). At which point you have to wonder: if your second home is worth several million, can’t you just afford to rent a house for a holiday without offering your own up in exchange?
The point, ThirdHome would say, is that its members receive access to variety above all else, without having to sell then buy a new second home each time. Modern travel is acquisitive and experience-based – just think about the number of times people have blithely told you that in the coming summer they are going to “do” Mexico – and high-end second home owners apparently often tire of the places they buy their homes, feeling as though the local area has run out of novelty. The average length of possession, per ThirdHome, is just five years before owners want to sell. While that might seem a little galling, not least to the poor souls (this author included) who have to make do with returning year-in-year-out to the apparently deeply boring seasides and muddy fields among which we spent our youth holidaying, the fact that ThirdHome is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary suggests they are correct: the super-rich hate being pinned down.
The idea of home exchange is not particularly new, though ThirdHome touts its extensive vetting process as a competitive edge (only the right sort of people will be allowed across the threshold of your Mallorquin finca, they promise). The company was recently featured on Paramount+, on a programme called Millionaire Holiday Home Swap. “Welcome to an elite club of home-swapping millionaires,” a honeyed voiceover declares. “Once you’re in, it’s a race against your fellow members to get to stay in your pick of the properties.” Cue an hour of the super-rich finding minor complaints to raise about one another’s second homes. Perhaps it’s better not to have a foot in this particular door; we’ll stick with those familiar muddy fields.
