Describe the business
We are a club for the owners of luxury second homes. If you own a luxury second home you shouldn’t have to pay to use other [properties] when you travel.
We have three tiers of memberships – rather like the ubiquitous freemium model as well as free membership we have two higher tiers that offer additional benefits.
Is home exchange popular?
Home exchange has been around for ages. It started through school teachers, they have so much time off that they used to swap houses between themselves. But we have a different way of looking at it.
How does it work?
So perhaps you own a beautiful little home in the south of France. You join the 3rd Home club and upload the property into your account. When it’s approved you give it a good description and upload some great photos. Then a pop-up calendar will appear that will allow you to select weeks when other members can use it. If you select lots of weeks you should be able to books lots of weeks in other properties.
There’s obviously a vetting process. We need to make sure that you are a decent member of society and we need to check that you actually own the property that you say you do.
How many people have signed up?
We have almost 4,000 properties in total.
The business was founded in 2008 during the recession – how did you weather the storm?
Everyone thought we were mad. Everyone else was battening down the hatches, but we actually felt quite strongly that this was the best opportunity and the best environment for us to start something like this.
The economic downturn was starting to show its teeth, and we sat around the table and said: “What’s the opportunity here?” We thought a lot of people had acquired homes in the good times and didn’t want to sell them, but wanted to start to add a bit more value to their lifestyles.
Were you aware of the sharing economy at the time?
I think we were lucky with our timing. I wasn’t aware of the growing, burgeoning sharing economy at the time. I think it had just got started really.
What have the main challenges been?
We’ve certainly had some tricky times. The trickiest was a couple of years ago when we found one member had gamed the system. He joined with a property and artificially inflated its value and booked a beautiful home. Effectively he booked a beautiful place without having given the club anything. It was against the ethos of the club and we felt as though we had been hacked. We obviously kicked him out of the club.
Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?
At university I wanted to go into advertising. You have to tell a story and convince people to like your brand or buy your products. Even though I wanted to go into that area I thought I would have my own company at some point.
I had my eureka moment when I decided that I didn’t want advertising to be the only thing I could do. I decided I wanted to do an MBA that was particularly entrepreneurship focused.
Working within a company there’s always a safety net – you have a salary coming in at the end of the month. You have to be a risk taker but you have to be comfortable with risk in order to be, not necessarily successful, but able to make that transition from working for a business to working for yourself.
Giles Adams is the president of 3rd Home
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