Woman, 32, who couldn’t afford to buy a home in her native New York reveals how she was able to snap up FIVE properties in Europe for a lower price than a SINGLE house in the US

A woman has spoken out about buying five beautiful holiday properties across Europe instead of 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 living there “for the foreseeable future,” as she stated in an essay for Business insider.

However, she quickly admitted that, barring an incredible stroke of luck, such as “a lottery win or a massive financial windfall,” the price range for purchasing a home in New York was “unaffordable” for her, especially amid the rising cost of living in the U.S.

For now, she’s renting a one-bedroom, 600-square-foot apartment for $2,850 a month — which is “pretty good by New York standards,” she admitted.

But if she were to buy something of a similar size in her neighborhood, she would be out almost a million dollars.

In 2020 and 2021, while in quarantine amid the pandemic, Jen went “crazy” and began obsessively Googling real estate in quaint towns across Europe, noting that the many listings were absurdly cheap.

“There were hundreds of articles about one-euro houses in little villages in Italy or France or Spain – and all these people who jumped at the chance and could build a house for $10,000 or something like that,” Amy recalled.

“I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I could do that.'”

Through her online research she discovered August, a ‘vertically integrated property group’ that connects people looking for holiday homes with a wide range of options in some of the most beautiful locations in Europe – from Mallorca in Spain to the French Alps. to the English countryside.

Essentially, August allows potential buyers to acquire a percentage of a ‘portfolio’ of five different properties in desired locations – with other buyers also owning shares of each listing.

Each owner is given sufficient flexibility to choose which weeks of the year he wants to spend in the home in question.

“The acronym I used when explaining it to my friends and family is, ‘It’s a non-scam timeshare because you actually have an equity stake and access to the properties you want,’” Amy said.

Amy continued: ‘The collection I have chosen consists of five houses in Tuscany, the South of France, the French Alps, the Cotswolds in England and Mallorca.’

She added that even though she is in the smallest of the three levels of house size, this still gives her “three to four bedrooms per house.”

For her share of all five homes, the buy-in was a “one-time fee” of €360,000, which is just under $390,000. Maintenance and taxes also cost approximately $10,000 per year.

Amy elaborated on her motivations for buying into the five homes she had “always toyed with or flirted with the idea of ​​living abroad.”

While studying at Colgate University, she spent a semester abroad in Stockholm and enjoyed the experience.

Although she had had peers who tried to visit as many places abroad as possible, she remembered that she “loved feeling settled and familiar” in Stockholm, and that was why she mainly “stayed put.”

“I really loved the sense of place and home I felt after only being there for five months,” she added.

Although she looked for job opportunities abroad after graduating, she never found the right job.

But during the pandemic, she began to reconsider what was actually possible for her personally — especially given the large number of companies beginning to allow remote work.

“During the pandemic, when the reality of what work completely looked like for a lot of people, that opened up the possibility. Maybe this is something I could do sooner than I thought,” Amy wrote.

‘I am very fond of traveling and living abroad, or at least spending a good portion of time away from my home base. It happened faster than I ever expected, but it was something I had been thinking about since high school.”

Amy went on to explain that she now owns approximately 1/21st of the portfolio of five homes, which is split between her and twenty other families.

“You get that kind of exposure and connection to a place, but you don’t have the hassle of a property manager, or the roof is leaking, but I’m 4,000 miles away,” she reflected on the setup.

When it comes to sharing the spaces with so many other families, August has a point system for dividing the time spent in a particular home.

“Everyone gets the same number of points, so it’s very egalitarian,” Amy explained.

‘You get 36 points per year, and every week is weighted differently. The peak months in summer are five points, and the shoulder season weeks are two points. From there it fluctuates a bit.

‘For me this was also a very attractive point: I have the flexibility to use the lower weeks because I have no children at school. Do I want to go for a month in October? I could do that because I don’t have to worry about anyone else’s schedule,” she emphasized.

She then estimates that the entire value of the property portfolio is probably worth around €7 million (just over $7.5 million).

‘I don’t have seven million euros to buy five properties across Europe. So what I was given access to was so much greater than anything I could have achieved on my own,” she emphasized about the benefits.

‘These are established, sought-after locations that will always appeal to a specific target group. So in that respect I felt safe too,” she added.

Most of all, she felt confident that even though New York City was her home, she didn’t feel the need to actually be a homeowner in New York, or in the greater tri-state area for that matter.

“Would I move to a suburb of New Jersey so I could buy a house? No. I wouldn’t make the calculation of moving – whether to another city, or another state, or a suburb – to buy a house. That is my reality,” she said.

At the same time, when she first set foot in the house in Mallorca, “I was just laughing in this house alone,” she recalls.

“I thought, ‘This is so cool. I’m standing in this beautiful house that I own. How cool is that? I’m here on an island. Who knows if I would have ever found my way here otherwise?’

‘It made me so happy and so proud. It made me proud of the achievement and the purchase of this.’