KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Living Made Accessible: Discover Picasso's Concept with Marnie Blanco

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Welcome to Real Estate Riches, where Kathy Burns empowers realtors to achieve the success they've always dreamed of. Starting her career at 55, Kathy built a thriving business that offers the freedom of time and financial independence. And now she's sharing her journey to help others do the same. Whether new to the industry or looking to level up, this channel is your hub for proven strategies, inspiring stories, and the tools you need to grow your real estate business. Join Kathy each week to explore global opportunities, successful systems. and expert insights to take your career to the next level. Get comfortable.

Pick a video and start learning. Your journey to success starts now. Hey, everybody. I'm Kathy Burns, and I'm excited today to have Marnie Blanco on. And she works for a very unique company, and I'm going to have you talk to it. Tell us all about it. Hey, Marney. Hello, Kathy.

Thanks for having me on. This is fun. Yeah. So I was telling Marnie the story of how I found out about Picasso, which is the company that she represents. So a good friend of mine who I've interviewed also on the podcast, Julie Horton was telling me how she had fractional ownership in a beach property. I said, I never heard of that.

And another person said, I think that's time sharing. She goes, no, it's very different. And that was a defining moment because people were dismissing it when they were hearing that. And this agent pops out this app and shows us Picasso. And he goes, yeah, and we can get paid 3%. And I go, okay, stop everything. Well, we're interested. And so we started to talk.

So Julie does it different from your organized system. And one of the things that Julie mentioned was that it is often in vacation areas, that that's where a lot of people want to have their second home. So let's just start. You kind of give us some background about you, about the company. then we'll kind of get going from there. Yeah, this is a perfect segue. Well, and Julie's experience probably is a great one to start on is that a lot of people have had fractional ownership. What we're doing isn't necessarily anything new. You and your friends might get together, you and your family

might get together and say, hey, wouldn't it be fun to own this home up in the Colorado Mountains or wherever it might be? So what we're doing is not new. However, though, that kind of DIY model can get kind of cumbersome sometimes, right? You get into the home, it's wonderful, but then all of a sudden, who's going to take care of it, who's going to manage it, who's going to buy all the stuff for the home? Do you agree on what to buy for the home? And then all the sudden, brother Tim over here doesn't want to be in it anymore. He wants to sell. He needs his money for something else. And you're like, whoa, whoa, you can't sell. We have this home together. And so it can kind of get kind of clumsy. And so what Picasso was was developed for is to solve for that, to solve for how you own homes together.

And then also make it more affordable for a lot more people, right? And so there's a lot of folks out there that go on vacation. We probably have all done it. You know, you're at an Airbnb or a hotel and you're thinking, God, this place is really cool. I would love to own a home here. You might start driving around. You might go look at the homes on, you know, online. And then you're like, oh, they're pretty expensive. I don't know if I can have a whole home here. So that's the entire mission of Picasso is to make second home ownership possible and more enjoyable for more people. And that's how we were started. As I mentioned, we just actually turned four years old yesterday, so we're about four.

We have homes in markets and over 40 markets throughout the U.S., and then we're also in London, Cabo, and Paris. And what our model is is we go and we buy these homes and all of these popular vacation markets, and we turn them into a co-owned home, which is just another word for fractionals. But co-ownership is a little bit more mature. It's a little bit more sophisticated in how it's handled. Once we have all the owners for the home, so we go by a home, we find up to eight owners. So you can buy an eighth, a quarter, or up to a half of a home. And once all the owners are in the home, Picasso then moves purely to a property management role at that time.

And we don't retain any ownership. So the owners have 100% ownership of the home. And to your point, you know, somebody said, well, this sounds like a timeshare. That in and of itself is why this is not a time share. So it is a true real estate asset that the owners own. Once we move into a property management role, we take care of everything of the home. We have home managers in every one of our homes and our markets basically help you enjoy the home. And so that you don't have to feel like when you go on vacation to your second home,

that you're waiting for the refrigerator repairman. you're cutting the lawn in the grass. You're fixing the sprinklers. We take care of all of that for you. So you really can truly just enjoy, you know, the beauty of the home and have, you know, a true vacation. So what's so exciting, I love that you shared that story to start with. We love when agents are talking about Picasso. That's my entire role. I'm Marnie Blanco. As you said, I handle the industry relations for Picasso. And that means working with brokers and agents and all the different aspects of the real estate industry. And our whole goal is to educate agents on how they can work with us. And as you said, we pay a full 3% commission just to refer a buyer to any one of our homes. And it doesn't matter where you live or where you're licensed because it's a referral to us. We partner you, the agent, with our sales team. Our sales team really takes care of probably the entire transaction. They're the ones who know the membership interest agreement that you have to sign, the operating agreement you have to sign. And the agent can stay as involved as much or as little as they want. But at the end of the day, if you bring us a buyer with a

simple introduction, we'll pay you the 3% commission on that share price. So it's a very cool, cool option and cool add-on for agents to add to their business. It is. Now I'll tell you some of the cons. And that's why I want to see how we can address them. Because every situation has its cons. Just like you said, I always caution people when they want to buy with family members. Oh, my gosh. this could be a nightmare. You know, you love each other today. You might hate each other tomorrow. Yep.

You know, and you might hate each other because you own the property together, you know. And so I'm like, in Julie's case, she says they all agree, which automatically made me question it. Do we all agree? She goes, she didn't know any of her partners in it. It was an agent coordinated, and that's the part that she was going to do. Okay. And I can see for some people this can work. It has clearly worked for her.

And hers has more responsibility on each one of those segmented people that are having those fractional shares. The thing that I heard was that a lot of these then turn into rental properties shares. And so now you've got people not taking the same kind of care of inside the house. can you coordinate that so that people that particular house doesn't get rented out? Yeah, so excellent question. Within the Picasso model, we at this time do not allow our owners to rent their homes. It is part of the operating agreement. Now, I'll tell you, though, that is a 50-50 conversation in our network. A lot of owners say, yes, I want to be able to rent the home. I want to offset my operating costs for the home. and a lot of owners are like, no, that's, you know, we went up to only eight owners in this home,

even, and they don't know necessarily know each other. They're typically anonymous, but they come in and they know it's capped and they know that these are true owners who take care of the home and, you know, and pride like their own home. And so we have kind of a kind of a little bit of a debate. You know, some markets are very, you know, attuned to having, you know, short-term rentals, et cetera. So that might be something we look at as an as a expansion of our model as we grow into, you know, wherever STRs are allowed, et cetera. And maybe that home starts purely like, this is definitely a home that can be rented. So all of those owners agree. And they're all in the same mindset. But they might have another home, even in that same market down the street. And those

owners are like, no, we are not doing it. So I do think it is something that we will give the empowerment to the owners to decide. And of course, if the markets don't allow STR, you know, we wouldn't even do that. So, but it's something that we'll, like, probably expand into at some point in time, just not at this point in time. Yeah, I get it. I also went on chat, GPT, and I said, tell me everything bad about this company. Oh, tell me what it's bad. I said, and tell me your resources because I wanted to know where it was. And the only thing that came up, you'll be happy to know, was that a couple of neighborhoods didn't want it in because they were concerned about it being like a rental. So, and those were in Florida. And I thought if that's all that you can come up with, okay, I'm excited.

And I think it's a marvelous tool. Now, of course, there's extra fees on this because you're doing them, first of all, the management of the sale. You're paying the agents. So that's added on probably to the cost to purchase the house. And I want you to break that down, but I want to touch on a couple of points. And then, obviously, there's a property management fee over and, above the HOA that would also be going on. So people would be buying in to all that understanding,

right? Yeah. And we're pretty transparent about how we do this. So we come in, we purchase the home, whatever that whole home price is. We have an interior design team that comes in then and completely outfits the entire home, everything, your furniture, your artwork, every utensil in the kitchen, spices in the kitchen, ketchup, mustard, condiments. We like to say that you could host a Thanksgiving giving dinner at your Picasso at any time. We have everything you need to get through that. So whatever that entire whole home price is, plus all the design work we do to the home, we bundle that into one large price. And whatever that is, we then market up anywhere from 10% to 25%, depending on the market and the place that we're in. At that point in time, we divide

by eight, and that's the share price. So every initial owner that comes into the home, that initial share price is the same. They all pay the same price. Now, what's unique about our model is you can resale your portion of your Picasso at any time that you want. As an owner, that is your right. Another big differentiator than a timeshare. You know, people always say easy and to get out. That's not the case with us. You can sell your portion.

It does go through us. We put it back on the MLS and we list it just like a traditional home at that point in time. Now, if an owner is reselling, then that price might be different, right? So you might see, you know, you could even have two owners in the same home. each selling their share and each have a different price because ultimately that owner decides their price. We give them insights and data and help them, you know, come to, you know, what we think is a reasonable market price. But ultimately, that owner decides on what they want to sell their share for. But they do it still through you? Still through us. Yeah, because what's hard is that we could have

outside agents do it, but the agent can't really do our, when you purchase Picasso, when we purchase the Picasso, we put it into an LLC. And then when our owners come in, what they signed with us is called a membership interest purchasing agreement and then an operating agreement of the home. And so what that does is that puts them into ownership of that LLC so that they ultimately own the LLC that owns the home. That's what I was going to ask you. So the deed has the LLC. Sits in the LLC. And the LLC defines who the owners are of the LLC. Yeah, which makes it nice. because then if you change owners, we don't have to be doing any title work, anything like that because that's in the LLC. But what we also do is when we initially purchase that home,

do the design work, come up with that initial price, we also put an entire operating budget together for that home. And what that includes is everything from your taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance, cleaning, turnovers, even a reserve fund. And whatever that budget is to operate the home, we divide that by eight and we pass that through to the owners. So, you know, it's just, like having your own home. You need to pay for it all year long with all of those type of fees, but now it's just divided by eight. You only pay a portion of it. And does that include the HOA if there was one? Well, so typically, yeah, if there is an HOA that is bundled into it. And then you just pay Picasso $100 a month to manage the home. So really, the fees are really passed through to the owners.

So that's not really something that where we make our money on the markup on the front end. Sure. So the $100, is that over and above that one-eighth thing? Yeah, over, like, so you have your operating expenses, all your taxes, utilities, insurance, et cetera. And then you pay us $100 a month. So each owner pays us $100 a month to manage the home. Yes, exactly. So it becomes, you know, quite affordable. I would say to kind of give you a reference point, our share prices, you know, are as low as, you know, $250,000 in like the Palm Springs. Indian Wells area, all the way up to about 2.6, 2.7 million, maybe in Aspen and Malibu, you know, those are the higher share prices. And then everything in between. So I'd say we average somewhere around 700,750,000 for a share price of a home. Okay. And that share price is that

1-8. That's the 1-8th. Exactly. And then I would say that monthly operating costs could go anywhere from $1,000 a month, upwards to $3,000 a month, you know, depending on what are the amenities of the home. Does it have a pool? Does it have a tennis court? Does it have pickleball courts? Our homes tend to be on the luxury end of the spectrum. Yeah, they're, oh, yeah, they're beautiful. They're about two to three times median home value. And, you know, in all the probably popular destinations that that you know and think of right now, like I said, we're, you know, all over the U.S. and then Cabo, Paris, and London, Cabo, Mexico is a very, very hot market for us. We get a lot of demand there. So likely our next expansion.

mansion will probably be into the Punta Mita area of Mexico because we have a lot of people asking for that. So it varies. It varies widely. There's kind of a little bit for everybody, depending on where you want to be. Are you working with developers in those areas at all for the new construction? We have, yeah. Contacts for you if you're interested. Oh, we'll always take contacts for sure. Yeah. We tend to do more turnkey homes is like probably preferable, is that, you know, It's a, all of our homes, and you'll see we, I invite everyone, please go to Picasso.com and look at our homes there. It's wonderful eye candy.

Make sure you have some time because you'll get sucked in. But all of our homes are very, you'll see, they're very modern, very new, very updated. They're definitely very genuine to their market, though. So like if you're in Palm Springs, you'll see that mid-century modern type of home. If you're in the mountains, you know, in Vale, Colorado, you'll see that quintessential, you know, mountain home type up there. So we're very true to the markets, but the insides. are very upscale. They're very modern, very clean. And so when we work with sometimes developers,

it depends. You know, we don't want to be waiting two, three years for something to be available because we're holding it. We like it a little bit quicker on the front end. So let me ask you this. I've got my one eighth piece. How often do I get to go? Great question. So you get one eighth of a year, which is about six to seven weeks per year. And you don't have to stay a week. So it's another differentiator between a timeshare. You know, time shares typically, they're like, you own week three, 22, and 47. With Picasso, it's almost more like owning a hotel. So the way that it works is that we have per one eighth ownership, you can hold six reservations at any given time. And those reservations can be anywhere from two days to two weeks. So you can stay two days to two weeks. And you can book them up to

two years out. And within those reservations, you can always be holding one holiday or one peak season. So like perhaps you have a home and bail and everybody loves to go skiing. Well, there's kind of a peak season there. And what we do is we allow owners to always hold one holiday or peak season. And then once they use it, they can go book another one. But they can't sit on a bunch of them because then they'll gobble up all a good time. Right. And so we try to make it very fair and equitable to our owners so that everybody gets their fair share of the calendar, right? We call it kind of our sun and ski guarantee. And so what it does is it kind of self-polices it. So somebody says, well, what if I went Fourth of July every year? I'm like, well, you typically can't have that.

You could book it this year. But until you stay there and use it and check out, you wouldn't be able to book another one for the following year. You could if you wanted to, if you really wanted to plan out that way. But what it does is it just kind of self-regulates the calendar. And our owner seems to be pretty happy with it. We have an entire scheduling app called SmartStay. It's built by Picasso. It's proprietary to Picasso. And all the intelligence and algorithms and rules are built into those, even, you know, per market, because every market's going to have different, like, special dates, peak seasons. You know, it's funny when you said the starting point was 250 because we were sitting there looking at the app. And I was with Julie. And she goes, oh, look at that. Just 250? That's great.

Well, she was seeing that as the price of the whole house, not the piece. Oh, yes. So that's how I saw it. And yet, when you said luxury, I'm thinking, well, that's not a luxury home. So you just brought me back to reality, which is great. Yeah. And I like it better. It makes more sense because I'm bringing people who can afford to do this.

And is this cash or are we financing? Perfect question. I would say about half of our buyers are cash buyers and half of them are financing. financing does go directly through us because you won't find a product for this with your local mortgage lender, of course. So it does go through us. You can finance up to 70% of the share price. And we even have a lot of creative financing strategies. So a lot of our homes might even be 0% down for up to 18 months. A lot of our homes, because they're a resale from an owner, they can do an assumable mortgage. And a lot of those rates are 3, 3.5, 4%. because they've had it, you know, for a couple of years. And so there's a lot of creative financing we can do. And I think that helps people as well figure out, you know, this is the right thing for them. And you've been around four years now doing this. So obviously it's growing if you're in other countries,

right? Yes. Yeah. We get a lot of Paris is our newest one. That was the one we just launched recently. And that really came about because we had so much demand. Everyone's like Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris. We're like, we're not ready for Paris. We're not ready for Paris. And they just, kept pushing. And so then we finally said, okay, let's go. And that actually has been quite a good market for us. I think what's interesting for consumers, especially when you're here in the United States to think about buying in Europe, ooh, how do I do that? Is it the same as buying here in the U.S.? Is there different laws, different agreement? We take care of all of that for you. So it literally is so streamlined. And I think that's what people really like. And now they have a home overseas and

they're thinking, oh, I don't want to have to manage that. We have people managing it for you. It's so turnkey and it really takes the headache or the confusion or any anxiety out of the purchase like completely out of the picture. Right. I was talking to, I do a lot in Portugal and which is a very hot spot, Kaskai and Lisbon and the Algar and I work with a firm there that covers the whole country. And she works with a lot of developers, different things that are either coming up. They have already been developed. Some are in pre-construction. But I asked them if they do fractional and they said they did. So it's not something that's foreign to them. But I'd love to introduce this to them if you thought down the road that this might be something where I could

connect the two of you. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think our entire goal is we will be everywhere someday. Yes. We can't go fast enough, right? We're trying to just go. And it's, But you've got to scale it in the right way. You have to make sure you have good home operations. Right. That's really the key, you know, is making sure our owners are very happy. You know, we have a customer satisfaction score of 4.8 out of 5. Our owners, you know, love the concept.

They love the model. You know, they are actually a very big referral channel for us, you know, referring their friends and family to us. So that's really important. And so as we grow as we scale into more markets, we're just always making sure we're doing it in the right way. Yeah, I love that. Well, that's the only way to do it and to survive.

Exactly. Your reputation is everything. Exactly. This is exciting. And I'm really grateful to have you on here, Marnie, and learn more about it. And I love the concept of it. The luxury market is so big right now. And yet people want to go more than just one place.

And you just gave them an opportunity. Yeah. And you're exactly right on that. We found when, you know, when we originally started the company, we started in the West Coast. We started out in Napa. Those were our first homes. And we had a lot of folks who, you know, this was more affordable option for them. They can now own a second home. And it's a dream of theirs. We're so, you know, happy to be able to help with that dream. And then we moved into the East Coast, like in the whole Florida and the Keys and that area. And we found we got it kind of a new audience of

people actually who could afford a $10 million home. But they're like, you know, does that make sense that I buy the entire home if I'm only going to be using it a few weeks a year? And so what they've done and what we've seen from a lot of our owners is they have multiple Picasso's now. So they have one in, you know, Miami. They have one in Aspen. They have one in Cabo. And so it kind of helps them diversify where, where they're at. In addition, we just opened up swapping for our owners. So if our owners are all, it's in, you know, it's a closed network, all of our owners, an owner could go and say, hey, I've got these 10 days booked for Cabo. If anybody is looking to swap this, you know, I'd be interested in Aspen. I'd be interested, you know, in Park City. And so they can go in and now they can start and we facilitate that swap between the owners so that they can experience, you know, another Picasso more so than just their own. So lots of options for the owners.

Let me ask you about that because that, a red slide popped up on that one for me, only because of care and the rental factor again. Do all the owners have to agree that that's an okay thing for that unit to be? swapped? Yes. So some of our homes are not in the swap pool. Majority of them are because our owners, but yes, that was something that the owners could select to do. Okay, good. And that's a part of that. Yeah. And there's a little bit of balancing in there. You know, if you have a $250,000 share in Palm Springs, is that the same as swapping with a $2.8 million in Aspen? So we've had to take a little bit of care in making sure that that's balanced and that the owners, you know, but the owners ultimately have say. control over that. Okay, good. Well, that sounds wonderful. Well, thanks so much, Marnie. I really appreciate you being on here, and I'm sure we will talk soon again, and I will definitely spread the word.

Oh, that's wonderful. Thanks so much, Kathy. And for anybody's watching, if you just go to Picasso.com, you can sign up as an agent on there. You'll get a full profile. We give you all the marketing resources you need. We basically, our homes are yours to sell. So you can go take pictures, photos, videos from our listings, and you can promote them. And, When you sign up on Picasso.com, I'll just leave you with this last thing. Agents get a unique referral link and you can put that referral link in with our photos. Hey, have you ever dreamt of owning a home in Aspen? And look at this beautiful home.

If they come through your referral link, you are attached to them and you get paid the 3%. So it is an easy add-on to an agent's business. It's a wonderful model for your clients to own a second home and just a really, really fun product. I love that. I'm going to have to get that referral link so I can put my link on here. Exactly. We will have all your information on all the different places that it's posted. So I'll be able to get in touch with you and I appreciate it again. Absolutely. Happy to be a help. Thank you so much for having me.

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