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Marnie Blanco is no stranger to Inman Connect — January’s conference in the Midtown Hilton will be her 38th, she estimates.
The senior vice president of industry relations at Pacaso sat down with Inman ahead of Inman Connect New York to discuss Pacaso’s planned presence at the event, along with the fractional ownership brokerage’s plans for 2024, its efforts to connect more with agents, and the future of co-ownership.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Tell me about what Pacaso has planned for Connect.
For us, it’s always very focused on connecting with agents everywhere. Right now, we’re in 40-plus markets in five countries. Because we can refer business to any of our homes anywhere in the world, it’s really important for us to connect with agents all over the place.
So it’s a lot of education and trying to show them that this is a bigger opportunity for them, no matter where they live or where they’re licensed since they can bring us buyers for any of our homes worldwide. Getting that education out and networking among different agents everywhere is really important to us.
Could you tell me a bit about the Pacaso Agent Ambassador program?
We’re going to be formally launching the ambassador program in March. It’s going to give agents more ways to work with Pacaso, on kind of a local flavor, and something that they’re familiar with. Rather than just bringing us buyers to any of our homes, it’s going to talk to agents a little bit closer to what they’re used to.
They like being the local experts; we’re going to need local expertise. We’re really going to start to engage with agents all over to say, “Hey, we need to lean on your local expertise for X, Y, and Z, and with that, we want you to become a Pacaso Ambassador agent.”
What should people expect from Pacaso in 2024?
Our Chief Legal Officer David Willbrand will be speaking at Inman and he’s going to be focusing on the growth of co-ownership — not only of vacation homes but even as a bigger trend — and what that looks like in terms of not only creating more inventory and helping the supply/demand imbalance that we have right now, but also new ways of helping people get into homes through financing.
We have a lot of creative financing that we’re able to do. Just recently, we launched a 0 percent financing program on many of our homes. A ton of our homes are resales, so they are current Pacaso owners who are reselling their portion of their home and we’re able to do assumable mortgages on those homes as well. Right now, with the with the crisis of mortgages going on, it’s very appealing not only to agents, because they can extend that to their clients, but to buyers as well.
Pacaso recently expanded into Paris. Are there any further expansion plans for 2024?
I think there’s going to be quite a bit more of that going on as well. Our demand funnels have gotten quite large in a lot of different areas. The expansion, I think, is going to be big. [There are] even some new things we’re starting to launch that will be coming out in 2024, like new developments.
For example, we have one in Washington where we’ve purchased several homes, and it’s almost going to become kind of like a Pacaso community, for lack of a better word, where we have several Pacaso homes, all right in the same neighborhood. We’re doing that in California and looking out east as well. So I think that there’s going to be a variety of expansion going on for Pacaso in 2024.
What other trends are you watching in the vacation home and investment property space?
We obviously stay focused on the vacation home market, but what we’re seeing that’s helping our model is the house hacking trend. I think I saw an article in Forbes the other day: It’s got three or four different buyers together.
They were buying a home, I think it was in the Bronx or Brooklyn, but [the agent] happened to have multiple buyers looking in the same area and she kind of pieced together a whole plan for them to help share and and co-own the home together. So I think this whole concept of co-ownership, while it’s definitely not new, is definitely growing.