[stopnamingnuts]

Clearly there are numerous markets supported by this model so I'm an outlier. My wife and I have considered fractional ownership of boats and vacation properties on several occasions. The things that turn me off every time is the inability to put a nail in a wall if I feel like it and the hassle overhead involved. I want to be able to whistle my dog into the car, hop in and go without having to coordinate with anybody else, knowing I have a toothbrush at my getaway spot.

[vidarh]

For me, to make a timeshare-like thing work, I think I'd need to be the owner with someone taking the hassle out of renting out access parts of the year, and repackaging financing around that.

With respect to the toothbrush in your getaway spot, I sometimes wonder if there'd be a market for someone arranging picking up, storing and delivering luggage on demand.

E.g. I might give up on owning if I can pick a flat to rent in a region I'd like to keep coming back to, and step on a plane with no luggage, knowing that when I got there, a chest with whatever I left behind last time had been cleaned, packaged up and stored and brought to the next place.

Coming somewhere and having my clothes ready and waiting, and not have to thin about packing would be fantastic.

You can get people to handle forwarding of your stuff from home, but that's complex and expensive. Of you come back to the same area or city regularly, then storage for a cubic meter or so of luggage with local-ish pickup and delivery a few times a year might well be reasonably cheap to operate.

[PaulHoule]

In Japan they have a system where they pick up your luggage at the airport or your hotel and deliver it to your next destination so you don't need to lug it around.

In America we have rollerbag hell at the airport and people are terrified of checking their luggage.

[vidarh]

That's nice, but that still requires me to pack it at home and get it to the airport when departing to start with.

What I'd like is more e.g. deciding I want to visit the French Riviera regularly (I live in London, 20 minutes by train from an airport with regular flights to Nice, and Nice airport is literally walking distance from the town centre, and I love the area), so I buy a chest w/storage there, bring clothes the first time and they pick it up at the end of my trip and hold on to it until I come back, and charges me a storage fee.

It's a niche service, but some places (like Nice) do have companies that specialise in maintaining and handling AirBnb rentals, so maybe it'd be a nice extra income for a company like that.

If I could get them to clean and iron my clothes as well, it'd be perfect. Arriving to have my luggage unpacked and ready, and just leaving it at the end of the trip would get me halfway to the benefits of owning a vacation property for small fraction of the cost.

I've actually contemplated contacting some of the property management companies in Nice to ask if they'd be willing to provide a service like that, even at a substantial premium to offer something bespoke...

[vineyardmike]

> I've actually contemplated contacting some of the property management companies in Nice to ask if they'd be willing to provide a service like that, even at a substantial premium to offer something bespoke

If you're the entrepreneurial type... i think this and/or your parent comment are very compelling and i'd be interested (im in US not EU but still)

[vidarh]

I think the challenging thing with this is that it's a niche market that is easily handled well enough by small local players if they want to, but I think it'd be a touch sales process to make it scale by aggregating fulfillment at scale and get people to think about this as something they want. From my perspective, in terms of the tech side it'd be "easy", and finding people to do the work shouldn't be that hard, but the sales process is something I'd be wildly uncomfortable with.

I suspect this is one of those things where you need a lot higher margin than you think to offset really high customer acquisition costs. You need to find people who believe they'll visit often, probably will visit less than they think, yet won't care too much about putting down 2k/year+ for the convenience, partly aspirationally.

A quick search shows storage units in Nice to stick with that, easily comes down to <8 euro month per cubic metre, btw., so it's certainly doable to make something like this into a relatively cheap subscription. The effort is in finding customers + signing up local partners to deliver.

[stopnamingnuts]

Well, I could have used that back in the 90s instead of lugging my crap up and down station stairs for the three or four connections between Narita and Urayasu. <sigh>

[ghaff]

>a market for someone arranging picking up, storing and delivering luggage on demand.

There are although there might need to be someone on the other end to accept the delivery.

These are mostly for business purposes though. I looked into it once for a complicated mixed personal/business trip and, while I don't remember the numbers, it was fairly pricey for an individual especially if you get free luggage on your carrier.

[vidarh]

See my other comment expanding on what I meant. I explicitly don't want to ship it from home, but have it stored in a city I want to come back to regularly so I don't have to ever pack when going there.

[bombcar]

Things like AirBNB have really put the nail in the coffin for timeshares, why do something complicated when you can just rent a house for a month at the time you want?

Similar things happen with boats, easier to rent when you need than try to fractionally own.

It sometimes works with small planes, but often those are set up like a "rental" where all renters collectively "own" the little company that owns the plane.

[JAlexoid]

The amount of planning you already need to do to fly a plane makes shared ownership of a plane makes sense.

And to be fair, a lot of the clubs will do shared ownership of a fleet of planes. Not just one.

[bombcar]

Yeah, and over time the significant costs of plane ownership are directly tied to "runtime" on the engine - so a plane that's not being "rented" doesn't cost a ton to keep on the flight-line.

[lastofthemojito]

Owning (kinda) means you won't be priced out of your favorite vacation spot as well. If you buy when you can afford it, you can keep going to the family beach house indefinitely. If you rent every year but your income doesn't increase with rental prices (which at least during COVID sure do seem to be outpacing inflation), you might not be able to take your "usual" vacation in a few years.

For me the thing that got me to briefly consider buying a vacation home was the flexibility in arrival/departure times and the corresponding advantage regarding traffic. At least in the DE-MD-VA-NC beaches where my family typically vacations, almost all rental houses are rented by the week, with either Saturday or Sunday as the arrival/departure day. Departure times are pretty strict (usually 10 or 11 am) as the place needs to be cleaned in time for the next week's rental. So everyone is on the road at once and traffic Saturday and Sunday during the day is just awful. The last time I drove from DC to the Outer Banks it took me a full 12 hours. I was so annoyed that at the end of the week, I left around midnight the night before scheduled departure, and I made it home in 6 hours. I made the return trip in half the time! If I owned the place, I could show up and leave whenever I felt like it (or not at all)!

[ghaff]

I don't think you are an an outlier. There are cases where timeshares probably make sense. I knew someone who had one up by a ski area and it sort of served as a convenient known-quantity forcing function to head up for the weekend on a regular basis.

But this? Spend $600K for 1/8 use of a house that you can't personalize in any way or, as you say, just use when you want to? Oh, and want to go somewhere else on vacation? Well, you already have this paid for property. Better go there.

[JAlexoid]

You're forgetting that in the current market theres a likelihood of a very good RoI for that share.

Various investment vehicles are buying up houses all over the world.

[ghaff]

It's a rather novel arrangement at this kind of price range though. I wouldn't place a bet on this being a better investment than other real estate opportunities.