Name: Here's how Pacaso founder and serial entrepreneur Austin Allison made his first million
Uploaded: 2024-05-02
Duration: 5 min 1 s
Description: Austin Allison, 38, is the cofounder and CEO of Pacaso, a property brokerage firm that buys single-family homes in ideal destinations and sells them to a handful of different buyers who each own shares.

Austin Allison, 38, is the cofounder and CEO of Pacaso, a property brokerage firm that buys single-family homes in ideal destinations and sells them to a handful of different buyers who each own shares.

Here's how Pacaso founder and serial entrepreneur Austin Allison made his first million

Austin Allison, cofounder and CEO of Pacaso.

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Allison, 38, is the cofounder and CEO of Pacaso, a property brokerage firm that buys single-family homes in ideal destinations and sells them to a handful of different buyers who each own shares.

The vision for Picasso is about democratizing access to second homes. But when we first started the company, we had to start somewhere and we chose to start at the very high end ultra luxury homes in ultra luxury markets. But the long term vision is about serving more people. And the only way to do that is by having more homes across more markets at more price points. Hey, I'm Austin Allison, co founder and Ceo of Picasso. I'm 38 years old and this is how I made my first million. I grew up in a small town north of Cincinnati, Ohio and my dad was a carpenter. I would say we basically live paycheck to paycheck. I mean, we were fortunate enough to have a home and food on the table. So we weren't like completely broke, but we didn't have discretionary income. Money was, was always a topic in the household. It was always a point of stress and tension for my parents. I started working before I can remember frankly, I was at the job site with my dad when I was three or four years old. I was working in construction and landscaping when I was a teenager, you know, 1213 years old. By the time I was 16 years old, I would say landscaping was, was the primary job that ultimately led to real estate. And for whatever reason I was intrigued by the industry. And by the time I was 18 years old, I needed to find a way to pay for college. So I decided to start selling real estate. I went to college at the University of Cincinnati. I studied architectural engineering and construction management. And then after undergrad, I ended up going into law school also at the University of Cincinnati. While most of the other students were out having fun and partying. I was working, I thought of and conceived the idea for dot Loop while I was selling real estate. And what I found is that I was chasing buyers and sellers around to get documents signed on the trunk of my car. So dot Loop is a software that enables real estate transaction to happen digitally. It's a tool that real estate agents use to create the documents, sign the documents with their clients and to manage the entire transaction from start to finish. And we built that company over a period of seven or eight years. And eventually, we're fortunate enough to sell to Zillow Group where I stayed on as an executive for about four years before leaving to start Picasso. So I made my first million dollars by selling dot Loop to Zillow group, we sold for about 120 million. So my wife and I were very fortunate to become second homeowners about 10 years ago. And when we became second homeowners in Lake Tahoe, it just changed our life in a really positive way. I learned that when you buy a second home, you're not just buying a piece of real estate, you're buying a second community, a second group of friends, a second life in many ways. And I wanted to find a way to make that dream possible for more people. And one of the light bulbs that went off for me along the way was the realization that most second homes are only utilized about 10% of the time, which means that we have a lot of empty homes sitting around the world. The whole idea behind Picasso is about connecting those two problems and opportunities on the supply side. It's about making available, what would have otherwise been empty second homes to buyers or prospective buyers who are interested and aspire to find their happy place. And we do that through a tech enabled marketplace that enables small groups of people to aggregate around beautiful luxury second homes and to co own those homes together. But Picasso manages every detail, everything from design to furnishing to bill pay and maintenance. We've created a proprietary scheduling tool called smarts stay which distributes the calendar fairly amongst the ownership group. So if you own 1/8 of a luxury Picasso Home Smarts Day will ensure that you get 1/8 of the peak season, 1/8 of the non peak season and 1/8 of the holidays, typically that works out to about five or six weeks, but you're not capped at that amount of usage. Meaning if other owners in the home are not using their full, then you would be able to actually use more than the 18 that you own. Our mission is about enriching lives by making a second home possible and enjoyable for more people. So everything that we do is is looked at through this lens of how do we enrich our customers lives, you know, more often and in a bigger way than we are today. So I think the combination of customer focus and great people leads to great business results.