A fast-growing second-home startup headed by Cincinnati native Austin Allison has been pegged as one of the 50 “hottest” startups in the nation.
Pacaso, which aims to modernize the practice of co-ownership – its marketplace allows for the buying, owning and selling of luxury second homes – ranked No. 33 on LinkedIn’s top 50 startups list, which was released Wednesday. The rankings, in their sixth year, are reserved for the “top emerging U.S. companies gaining attention and recruiting top talent.”
Allison, who founded Dotloop, a local real estate tech startup that sold to Zillow Group for $110 million in 2015, launched Pacaso with Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s co-founder and former CEO, in 2020.
The company became the fastest startup to hit unicorn status, when it reached a $1 billion valuation five months after its launch. Pacaso doesn’t maintain an official headquarters, although its most frequently pegged to San Francisco. It maintains an office in Cincinnati.
Pacaso, pronounced “Picaso,” aims to modernize the generations-old practice of co-owning a second home. Unlike a timeshare, Pasaco said its buyers own property, not time. Buyers considering second-home ownership tell Pacaso where they want to buy, how much they want to spend and the amount of time they expect to be in the home. Pacaso and its real estate agent partners help find the property and set up an LLC designed for co-ownership. The buyer purchases their desired share – half the home, for example, guarantees access to the home for half the year – and Pacaso briefly purchases the remainder of the home before reselling the remaining portion to vetted buyers.
Pacaso manages the property, and owners can use Pacaso’s mobile app for scheduling stays. Buyers pay a service fee at the time of purchase and a property management fee each year.
The company now has homes in 40 destinations across four countries.
“It’s lightning in a bottle…from a macro perspective, there’s been more tailwind for second homes than we expected,” Allison told me last year. “What we saw with Covid is this permanent shift in the way people work, and therefore the way people live.”
Pacaso is the only company with local ties to rank on the LinkedIn top startups list since its first release in 2017.
Discord, a social messaging platform with more than 150 million active users, came in at No. 1 for 2022.
To compile the list, LinkedIn looked at data across four pillars: employee growth; jobseeker interest; member engagement within the company and its employees; and how well the startups pulled talent from the LinkedIn top companies list. LinkedIn also said it prioritized startups that are “focusing on sustainable growth amid uncertainty.”
To be eligible, companies must be fully independent, privately held, have 50 or more full-time employees and be 7 years old or younger.
