Today’s RealTrending features Austin Allison, founder of Pacaso, a co-ownership model that allows people to own a second home at 1/8 of the cost. Austin shares his insights on prop-tech innovation surrounding financing, talks about what’s next for Pacaso and shares where he sees the opportunity in today’s market.
Here is a small preview of today’s interview with Austin. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity:
Tracey Velt: Let’s talk about how real estate and startup leaders are making decisions in today’s economy.
Austin Allison: You have to be productively paranoid and very conservative in the way that you’re managing your business, your expense base, and your cash position. There’s just so much uncertainty and turbulence right now, it makes it more difficult to forecast. In an environment like that, I like to have a lot of options and a lot of runway. So that’s how we’re running our business. That’s the kind of the prudent way for any startup company to run their business in an environment like this.
I’ve also found that scarcity and challenging times like this really breed creativity, they breed resourcefulness. And it gives companies an opportunity to innovate in ways that they may not have been able to innovate previously. So, an example of that at Picasso is we recently launched a product called Picasso now, which is effectively like an alternative payment plan, as a way to bring it back to that financial innovation that we talked about earlier. That’s pretty game changing for our customers.
The RealTrending podcast features the brightest minds in real estate. Every week, brokerage leaders, top agents, team leaders, and industry experts share their success secrets, trends, and lessons learned navigating this ever-changing industry. Hosted by Tracey Velt and produced by Elissa Branch.