If there is one drawback above all others about owning a vacation home, it’s that you’re stuck going to the same place year after year.
Well, “stuck” may be too strong a word. But you are limited. Unless you have the wherewithal to travel at will anywhere you like, you are pretty much restricted to that one spot.
Or at least you were until 18 months ago, when a fledgling exchange service for second-home owners called 3rd Home opened for business in Nashville.
A Web-based company, 3rdHome.com is in its infancy. At last count it had just 300 members who had listed 400 properties. But what properties they are.
They range in value from $500,000 to more than $25 million, including a villa in Villefrance-Sur-Mer on the French Riviera; a mountainside home — five bedrooms, five bathrooms and five fireplaces — in Big Sky, Mont.; a 12-bedroom oceanfront manse in the Dominican Republic; and a 43,000-square-foot monster in Costa Rica.
Although most members’ second homes are in the U.S., the listings feature homes all over the world. “We have a good base of members in close to 60 countries,” said Terry Weaver, a 3rd Home partner who is the company’s chief sales officer.
One of Weaver’s partners in the venture is Wade Shealy Jr., a longtime resort real estate specialist who had a go at this idea 15 years ago when he started Vacation Link, an exchange service that allowed people to use their second homes as collateral to travel the world.
