A woman has talked about buying five stunning holiday properties across Europe rather than spending all her savings on a small apartment in New York City.
Amy Beihl, 32, is a digital consultant who insisted she loves her life in New York and will continue to live there “for the foreseeable future,” as she stated in an essay for Business Insider.
However, she was quick to admit that barring an incredible stroke of luck, such as “a lottery win or a giant financial win,” the price range for purchasing a residence in New York was “cost prohibitive” for her, particularly amidst the skyrocketing cost of living in the United States.
For now, he’s been renting a 650-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment for $2,850 a month, which is “pretty good by New York standards,” he admitted.
Amy Beihl, 32, is a digital consultant who feels at home in New York City, but realistically couldn’t afford to become a homeowner in the metropolis.
Instead, Amy worked with a real estate agency called August that made it easy for her to become co-owner of five homes in idyllic locations across Europe, including in Mallorca, Spain (pictured).
Amy had always dreamed of living and working abroad. In the photo, her house in Mallorca.
But buying anything of similar size in your neighborhood would cost you close to a million dollars.
In 2020 and 2021, while quarantined amid the pandemic, Jen was going “crazy” and began obsessively Googling real estate in quaint towns across Europe, noticing that many listings were absurdly cheaply priced.
“There were hundreds of articles about one-euro houses in small towns in Italy or France or Spain, and all these people who took advantage of that opportunity and were able to build a house for $10,000 or something like that,” Amy recalled.
“I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I could do that.'”
It was through her online research that she discovered August, a “vertically integrated real estate group” that connects holiday home seekers with a wide range of options in some of the most beautiful locations in Europe, from Mallorca in Spain to the Alps French. to the English countryside.
In essence, August allows potential buyers to purchase a percentage of a “portfolio” of five different properties in desirable locations, with other buyers also owning shares of each property for sale.
Each owner has ample flexibility to choose which weeks of the year they wish to spend at the given property.
“The shorthand I used when I explained it to my friends and family was, ‘It’s a timeshare that’s not a scam, because you actually have an ownership stake and you have access to the properties you want,'” Amy conveyed.
Amy continued: “The collection I chose are five houses located in Tuscany, the south of France, the French Alps, the Cotswolds in England and Mallorca.”
He added that while it’s on the smallest of the three home size tiers, that still gives you “three to four bedrooms per home.”
For his share of the five houses, the purchase was a “one-time fixed fee” of 360,000 euros, just under $390,000. Maintenance and taxes also cost approximately $10,000 a year.
He now owns 1/21 of a “portfolio” of five different holiday homes, including Mallorca (pictured), Tuscany, the south of France, the French Alps and the Cotswolds in England.
When she first set foot in the Mallorca house (pictured), “I was smiling alone in this house,” she recalled.
Amy explained her motivations for purchasing the five homes she had “always toyed with or flirted with the idea of living abroad.”
While studying at Colgate University, he spent a semester in Stockholm and loved the experience.
While she had had colleagues who tried to visit as many places as possible while abroad, she recalled that she “loved feeling settled and familiar” in Stockholm, so for the most part she had “stayed where she was.”
“I really loved that sense of place and home I felt after only being there five months,” he added.
Although he looked for job opportunities abroad after graduating, he never found the right opportunity.
But during the pandemic, she began to reconsider what was actually possible for her personally, especially given the number of companies that began allowing remote work.
‘During the pandemic, when the reality of what work was like completely changed for many people, the possibility opened up. “Maybe this is something I could do sooner than I thought,” Amy wrote.
‘I’m very much in love with traveling and potentially living abroad, or at least spending a good amount of time away from my home base. It happened sooner than I expected, but it was something I had thought about even since high school.’
Amy went on to explain that she now owns about 1/21 of the five-home portfolio, which is split between her and 20 other families.
Amy estimates that the portfolio of the five houses she partially owns is worth around €7 million (a little over $7.5 million). Her photo shows a house similar to hers in the south of France.
For the five properties, Amy paid a one-time fee of 360,000 euros (just under $390,000), plus $10,000 annually for maintenance and taxes. Her photo shows a house similar to hers in Tuscany.
“What I had access to was far greater than anything I could have achieved on my own,” he said of the price. Pictured is a house similar to his in the French Alps.
“You get that kind of familiarity and ties to a place, but you don’t have the hassle of having to have a property manager, or the roof leaking but I’m 4,000 miles away,” he reflected on the montage.
When it comes to sharing spaces with so many other families, August has a points system for dividing up time spent in a given house.
“Everyone gets the same amount of points, so it’s very equal,” Amy explained.
‘You get 36 points a year and each week it is weighted differently. Peak summer months are five points, and then shoulder season weeks are two points. From there it fluctuates a bit.
‘For me, this was also a really attractive point: I have the flexibility to be able to take advantage of the lower scoring weeks because I don’t have kids in school. Do I want to go for a month in October? I could do that, because I don’t have to worry about someone else’s schedule,” she noted.
He then estimated that the total value of the real estate portfolio would probably be around €7 million (just over $7.5 million).
‘I don’t have 7 million euros to buy five properties throughout Europe. So what I had access to was far greater than anything I could have achieved on my own,” he emphasized of the benefits.
‘These are established and sought-after locations that will always appeal to a certain demographic. So I felt safe in that sense as well,” she added.
Above all, she was sure that while New York City was her home, she didn’t feel the need to own a home in New York, or even in the tri-state metropolitan area.
‘Would I move to the suburbs of New Jersey so I could buy a house? No. I wouldn’t do the math to move, whether to another city, another state, or a suburb, to buy a home. That’s my reality,’ she said.
At the same time, when she first set foot in the house in Mallorca, “I was smiling alone in this house,” she recalled.
“I thought, ‘This is great. I am in this beautiful house that I have. How cool is that? I’m here on an island. “Who knows if I would have ever found my way here otherwise?”
‘It just made me very happy and very proud. He made me proud of the achievement and of having purchased it.’