- Amy Beihl loves living in New York, but felt buying even a small apartment was beyond her budget.
- Instead, Beihl chose fractional ownership: investing in a share of five vacation homes in Europe.
- She spent less than she would have in NY, gets to enjoy vacations, and feels a bit of ownership.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amy Beihl, a 32-year-old working in digital consulting, about her decision to buy a 1/21st stake in five European vacation properties in 2022 through August Collections instead of purchasing her own home in the US. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I love New York, and I will be here for the foreseeable future.
Circumstances can change, but barring a lottery win or a giant financial windfall, buying here is cost-prohibitive for me.
I live in a one-bedroom, 650-square-foot apartment for about $2,850 a month — which, by and large, is pretty great for New York standards. But to replicate that with ownership in the neighborhood I’m in is well out of my price range.
To buy something in New York that I would want — we’re talking one-bedrooms with dens, or two-bedrooms, we’re not talking about McMansions here — it’s well over $1 million.
When I was sitting in my apartment stir-crazy in 2020 and 2021, I started poking around. There were hundreds of articles about one-euro houses in tiny villages in Italy, or France, or Spain — and all of these people who jumped at that opportunity and were able to build a house for $10,000 or something.
I was like, “Wow, maybe I could do that.” I don’t speak any language that’s not English. I don’t own a home here, so why would I try to buy or build a home in a land that I can’t natively converse in?
Through a random Google search hole, I stumbled across August’s website, and I just really dug the concept. It seemed to make a lot of sense.
The shorthand I used when explaining it to my friends and family is, “It’s a non-scammy timeshare, because you actually have an equity stake and you have access to the properties that you want.”
The collection I chose is five houses that are in Tuscany, the South of France, the French Alps, the Cotswolds in England, and Mallorca. The three tiers are small, medium, and large — I’m in the small, which is three to four bedrooms per house.
The buy-in was 360,000 euros (or $394,117), and that’s a flat one-time fee. There’s an annual fee that includes maintenance, electrical, and taxes as well, and that’s about $10,000 a year.
Spending time abroad has always appealed to me
I have always toyed or flirted with the idea of living abroad.
I went to Colgate University, in upstate New York. I took a semester and lived in Stockholm and I loved that experience. I know a lot of people, especially Americans, go to Europe, and every four days they’re in another city: “How many places can I cross off?”
I did the opposite, and I stayed put. I just loved feeling settled and familiar. I used the subway system. I got shockingly good at reading and speaking Swedish — none of which I could do now — but I really loved that sense of place and home that I felt after being there for just five months.
When I graduated, I looked at job opportunities abroad, but it was just never the right thing. It never presented itself, so I was never able to move fully abroad. But that dream has always been there.
During the pandemic, when the realities of what work looked like completely shifted for many people, that opened up the possibility. Maybe this is something I could do sooner than I thought.
I don’t think we’d be having this conversation if it weren’t for the pandemic. If nothing had changed in terms of the ability to work remotely, I’m not sure this would’ve happened for me at this point in time.
I’ve been very enamored with travel and living abroad potentially, or at least spending a good chunk of time away from my home base. It happened sooner than I ever expected, but it was something that I’ve thought about even since high school.
Part-owning the vacation homes is a blast so far
There are 21 families that have access. So I own 1/21st of this portfolio.
You get that type of familiarity and ties to a place, but you don’t have the hassle of having to have a property manager, or the roof’s leaking but I’m 4,000 miles away.
There’s no stress and responsibility when you get to the house. There are none of the logistical burdens that come with homeownership. I’m a renter — there’s so much I don’t know.
I am an atypical August buyer. Most people are European, are older with kids who are at least in their teens, or they’re retired. I am a big outlier in a lot of ways, and that works perfectly for me.
August breaks it down by points. Everyone gets the same amount of points, so it’s very egalitarian. You get 36 points a year, and each week is weighted differently. Peak summer months are five points, and then shoulder-season weeks are two points. It kind of fluctuates from there.
For me, this was also a really attractive point: I have the flexibility of being able to use the lower-point weeks because I don’t have kids in school. Do I want to go for a month in October? I could do that, because I don’t have to worry about someone else’s schedule.
I’m going to be in the south of France next month with my parents. In the fall, I’m going on a trip with some of my girlfriends from college.
Always having something to look forward to feels really good. Really, really good.
Fractional ownership worked for me
In no world could I buy something in New York City, in a place I was happy with, for that amount of money. That money is going nowhere where I live. But 370,000 euros, which includes one year’s annual fee, can go fairly far in some of these places — in Tuscany, or in France.
From a cost perspective, it became a no-brainer. The cost went so much farther here.
I think the portfolio is worth 7 million euros (or $7,655,025). I don’t have 7 million euros to buy five properties across Europe. So what I got access to was so much greater than anything I would’ve been able to achieve on my own.
There’s never no risk associated with purchasing or investing in real estate, but there are certainly safer locations to invest in. I felt pretty confident that the public at large, who would be interested in these properties, aren’t going to wake up one morning and decide that they don’t like Tuscany anymore.
These are established, sought-after locations that will always have an appeal to a certain demographic. So I also felt safe in that regard.
I have the joys of homeownership but none of the stress
New York is my home, but homeownership in the US isn’t a priority for me in the grand scheme of things the way that it is for some people.
Would I move to more suburban New Jersey so I could buy a house? No. I would not make the calculus to move — whether that’s another city, or another state, or a suburb — to buy a house. That’s my reality.
I remember when I first stepped foot in the Mallorca home — that was the first time I visited — and I was just smiling alone in this house.
I was like, “This is so cool. I am standing in this beautiful house that I own. How cool is that? I am here on an island. Who knows if I ever would’ve found my way here otherwise?”
It just made me so happy and so proud. It did make me feel proud of the accomplishment and purchasing this.
Is homeownership the metric for financial success that we should all be striving for? That’s an open question in America, and I think everyone will view that a little bit differently.
Homeownership does, rightly or wrongly, feel like it is on that prescribed path: I went to high school, I went to college, I got a job, then I’m going to find a husband, buy a house, have a kid, have another kid.
There’s always a little bit of a path that you feel pressure to walk down whether you want to admit it or not.
Homeownership feels like it’s on that path for me, and so this was definitely a way to feel accomplished. It checked that box in a way that made sense for me.
