How Do Co-Owners Split the Year?

Every buyer asks a version of the same three questions.

What if I want Christmas and everyone else wants it too?
What if I decide on Thursday to take the kids up for the weekend?
What if two families want the same week in July, every single year?

Underneath all three is one fear. Will I actually get to use this home when I want to?

This article is our answer. It is the exact set of rules we are launching our first Suncadia home with, including the real numbers.

Where this stands

This is the model we are launching with, not a model we are certain about. We needed a place to start, and this is the one we could defend with arithmetic rather than opinion. As buyers tell us where it does not fit, we will make adjustments to the model.

What does not change is the home you buy into. The rules for a specific home are written into that home's LLC operating agreement and signed at closing. They do not move underneath you afterward.

The owners can still change how their home works, and Klasma runs that vote. Moving nights between owners, or adding or removing a holiday, takes a vote of two-thirds of the ownership. Smaller adjustments, like the booking window, can only move inside limits the operating agreement sets, and come with 30 days' notice. No change ever touches a reservation already made.

Nights, not weeks

Most co-ownership listings sell you weeks. A 25% stake gets you about 12 weeks a year.

We count in nights instead, and the reason is not cosmetic. A week is a bad unit for dividing a year among people. Say a season holds 16 good weeks. Split between four owners, that is 4 each. Split between three, it is 5.33, which is not a thing anyone can book.

The same season in nights is 99 nights, and 99 divided by three is 33. Nothing to round, nothing to argue about.

Nights also match how this particular home gets used. Suncadia is about an hour and a half from Seattle, so a co-owner can leave after work on Friday and be home Sunday night. A week is the wrong unit for that trip. Charge someone a full week for two nights and they stop taking the short trips, which is most of what a drivable home is good for.

So every number in this article is a night count. If a number decides something, it is in nights. Weeks are fine in conversation, but they never carry an allowance.

The calendar comes before the rules

Before any rule below can run, a home needs a calendar. Which nights are in high demand, which are ordinary, and which dates are named events with their own claim on the year. That calendar is not a template we copy from home to home. We build one per development, out of three things.

The place and what it is for. Geography, weather and the amenities that come with them decide when demand actually peaks. At Suncadia that is summer and the school breaks.
The family structure of the ownership group. Married with school-age children is a different calendar from married without children, or a single owner. School breaks only matter if somebody is on a school schedule.
High-demand events near the property. A festival, a race weekend or a local season can put pressure on dates the weather alone would not explain.

The Suncadia calendar assumes school-age children. I built it around a family like mine, with two kids aged eleven and thirteen, because that is the buyer this first home is for. Spring Break and Mid-Winter Break are load-bearing dates in that year. An ownership group with no children in school would get a calendar that treats those weeks as ordinary and puts the weight somewhere else.

Hold onto that as you read the numbers below. The rules are standard across every home. The calendar they run against is not.

There are two kinds of time, and they need different rules

Some time is interchangeable. One week in July is much like another. Miss it, take a different one, and you have lost almost nothing.

Other time is not. There is exactly one Christmas a year. Whoever has Christmas Day has Christmas, and no other date substitutes for it.

That difference decides everything about how each kind gets allocated. Interchangeable time can be divided among owners inside a single year. A named holiday can only be divided across years, by taking turns.

So we run two mechanisms.

Named events such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, Spring Break and July 4th are allocated by rotation. Each year, one owner gets first pick inside each event.
Open season such as summer is first come, first served against your night allowance, with a cap on how much you can hold at once.

Length has nothing to do with which is which. On the Suncadia calendar Christmas runs ten nights, long enough to split, but Christmas Day is a single point. Summer is 89 nights with no focal date anywhere in it.

Christmas and Thanksgiving are the two long windows for a reason. They are the holidays where most people get real time away from work and travel for a stretch of family time, so the window has to be long enough to hold the whole visit. Memorial Day and Labor Day are long weekends, and they are four nights each. Nobody takes ten nights for Labor Day.

Those lengths are a decision about this home, not a fixed property of the platform. Every calendar Klasma supports can handle holidays differently. A group that never travels for Thanksgiving could leave it off the named-event list entirely and let those nights be booked like any others.

December 2026

SSun

MMon

TTue

WWed

TThu

FFri

SSat

Christmas, 10 nightsNew Years, 4 nightsNon-peakChristmas Day

Two named events sit in December, and both are super-peak. Christmas runs Fri Dec 18 to Sun Dec 27, ten nights across two weekends. New Years runs Mon Dec 28 to Thu Dec 31, four nights. Each rotates separately. The ten-night window is long enough to divide. The square outlined in gold is not.

What the Suncadia calendar actually holds

Every date sits in one of three demand tiers, set for that specific property, because peak season in central Washington is different from peak season somewhere else.

super-peak nights

12% of the year, all of it inside named holidays

peak nights

89 of them are summer

221

non-peak nights

the quiet majority of the calendar

Worth sitting with that first number. Super-peak is 12% of the year, not a third. The instinct that a calendar divides into equal thirds is wrong, which is why our model reads from a calendar that is built for the demand of the area where it resides.

Here is the whole year.

Super-peak45 nightsPeak99 nightsNon-peak221 nights

The 8 named events, 55 nights

Mid-Winter BreakFeb 13 to Feb 22 · 10n
Spring BreakApr 3 to Apr 12 · 10n
Memorial DayMay 22 to May 25 · 4n
July 4thJul 3 to Jul 5 · 3n
Labor DaySep 4 to Sep 7 · 4n
ThanksgivingNov 20 to Nov 29 · 10n
ChristmasDec 18 to Dec 27 · 10n
New YearsDec 28 to Dec 31 · 4n

Every night outside these events is booked first come, first served against your allowance. That includes both Summer Peak blocks, which are 89 of the 99 peak nights.

Suncadia Primary Calendar, 2026. Ten windows across 365 nights.

Your allowance in each tier is that tier's nights times your percentage of the home, rounded down. Owners don't have to hold equal stakes. A 40% owner gets 40% of each tier. With equal owners, it is the same as dividing by the number of owners:

Per owner, per year	2 owners	3 owners	4 owners
Super-peak	22 nights	15 nights	11 nights
Peak	49 nights	33 nights	24 nights
Non-peak	110 nights	73 nights	55 nights
Total	181 nights	121 nights	90 nights

Rounding down leaves a handful of nights a year unclaimed. Those are the maintenance buffer.

Turnover is separate, and it comes out of the calendar rather than out of your allowance. Nobody is charged a night for cleaning. In open season that costs nothing real, because the calendar is never full and the gap is already there. Inside a holiday it does cost something. Every super-peak night at Suncadia sits inside a named event, so when two owners split a ten-night window, the changeover night between them is a night neither of them books. Split all three of the long windows and the 45 super-peak nights yield 42. Read the super-peak row as a ceiling rather than a promise.

For context, the average vacation homeowner uses their property about six weeks a year, according to the National Association of Realtors. Ninety nights is more than double that.

Holidays go by rotation

Suncadia has eight named events covering 55 nights. Mid-Winter Break, Spring Break, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years.

Each year the rotation decides who picks first inside each one. First pick is not the whole holiday, and on a long window that matters.

A three-night Memorial Day weekend is used up by whoever picks first. A ten-night Christmas window is not. The owner with first pick takes the nights that contain Christmas Day, and the rest of the window stays open for a co-owner to book. Only one owner gets Christmas. A second owner can still get a stretch of December inside the same window.

December 2026

SSun

MMon

TTue

WWed

TThu

FFri

SSat

First pick, 5 nights, holds Christmas DayCo-owner, 4 nightsTurnover nightNew Years, 3 nights, a third owner

One way the Christmas window can land. The owner with first pick takes Wed Dec 23 to Sun Dec 27 and has Christmas. A co-owner takes Fri Dec 18 to Mon Dec 21, separated by the turnover night on Tue Dec 22. Each family gets a weekend. They are in the same window, but only one of them has the holiday. New Years is a separate event with its own rotation, so it can go to a third owner, who takes Tue Dec 29 to Thu Dec 31 after a second changeover night on Mon Dec 28.

Three things make it hold up.

You cannot take the same event two years running if a co-owner wants it. If nobody else wants it, it comes back to you. Nobody has to approve anything. The deadline passes and it returns.
Priority follows the claim, not the trip. If you reserved Christmas, you held Christmas, whether or not you cancelled and whether or not you went. Otherwise an owner could claim it every year, cancel each time, and never lose their turn.
The order is set at closing. Whoever buys in first picks first, then the order shifts by one every year. The first buyer's advantage lasts exactly one year, and over a full cycle everyone occupies every position once. When stakes are unequal, the rotation is weighted by ownership, so a larger owner picks first more often. A buyer who takes over a stake takes over the seller's place in the rotation.

Eight events against at most four owners means every owner can expect a marquee date every year, and no owner can hold both Christmas and Thanksgiving in the same one.

Summer is first come, with one limit

Summer and ordinary dates are booked first come, first served against your allowance. No draft, no lottery, no waiting for an annual round. Book when you know what you want.

The one restraint is that you can hold at most half your annual allowance at a time, rounded down.

Held at once	2 owners	3 owners	4 owners
Super-peak	not applicable	not applicable	not applicable
Peak	24 nights	16 nights	12 nights
Non-peak	55 nights	36 nights	27 nights

Book half your summer, take those trips, then book the rest. The point is that a co-owner opening the calendar in March finds real dates available, instead of a year already claimed end to end by whoever booked fastest.

Two details worth knowing. The limit counts nights rather than bookings, because a cap on bookings is easy to game. Four bookings could be 12 nights or 56 depending on length, which would punish the owner who takes short weekends. And it does not apply to the named holidays, because rotation already allocates those. At Suncadia every super-peak night sits inside a holiday, which is why that row reads not applicable.

When the calendar opens

Twelve months ahead, and no further. We built the Suncadia calendar with families in mind, and two of its events are school breaks. Districts usually publish their key dates about a year ahead, not two, so a longer window would be booking against dates nobody can confirm yet.

The twelve months is set by us, per development, from that development's own calendar. It is not a seller option. A home with no school calendar to work around could reasonably run longer, and we would set it there for the same kind of reason we set twelve here. A seller chooses the number of owners, each owner's percentage, and a few house settings, such as whether pets are allowed and whether guests can stay without an owner there. The scheduling rules themselves are standard, which is what keeps one set of rules for a buyer to learn and one for a lawyer to draft.

Ordinary dates open one at a time, rolling. A holiday opens as a whole block, twelve months before it starts, and its rotation resolves then. Christmas 2027 opens on 18 December 2026.

Stays run from 2 to 14 nights, with a night between stays for turnover. Inside a named holiday the minimum is three.

The changeover night sits between any two stays, including two that fall either side of a boundary between events. Christmas ends on 27 December and New Years begins on the 28th, so if those go to different owners, one of those nights is the turnover and not a night either of them books.

That split is deliberate, because the minimum is doing two different jobs. In open season it is a floor on trip length, and at that distance the real trip is often two nights. A three-night floor would tax the Friday-to-Sunday weekend, which is most of what a drivable home is for. Inside a holiday it decides how finely the window divides instead. At three nights a ten-night Christmas splits two ways and no further. At two it would split three ways, and a holiday split three ways stops being a holiday.

Cancelling

Cancel more than seven days out and the nights come back to you. Cancel inside seven days and they are spent.

Seven is deliberate, and it is shorter than the industry norm of 30. A long fence backfires. At 30 days, an owner who realizes on day 25 that they cannot go gains nothing by telling anyone, since the nights are gone either way. So they say nothing, and the home sits empty while no co-owner ever learns it was free. At seven days they still get the nights back, so they release them. The shorter fence produces more releases and better use of the home.

The rules enforce themselves

Everything above is enforced by the Klasma scheduling engine. It knows your allowance in each tier, it knows your hold limit, it knows whose turn it is at Christmas this year, and it knows the seven-day cancellation fence. An owner cannot book past their allowance, and no co-owner has to be the one who points it out.

That matters more than it sounds. The way co-ownership usually breaks is not a bad rule. It is a fair rule that nobody wants to enforce against a friend, so it quietly stops being a rule. Keeping the arithmetic inside the system means the ownership group never has to have that conversation.

This article is long because the reasoning is worth showing. Booking is not. You open the calendar, pick your nights, and the rules resolve underneath you.

What a year actually looks like

Here is a one-third owner at Suncadia, with 121 nights to spend.

Their holidays, 14 of 15 super-peak nights. The rotation gives them first pick at Thanksgiving this year, so they take five nights, and a co-owner takes the rest of the window. They take six nights of Spring Break in April and the three-night July 4th weekend. Next year the rotation moves and they pick first somewhere else.

Their summer, 33 peak nights. Their hold limit is 16 peak nights at a time, so they book two weeks in July, take the trips, then book a week in August and a long stretch in June once the earlier bookings clear.

Everything else, 73 non-peak nights. Long weekends. A week of spring skiing in March. October when the larches turn. This is the tier nobody competes for and where the allowance never really binds.

That is a family using a home most weekends they want it, plus a marquee holiday every year, at a third of the cost of owning it outright.

Disagree with this approach? Let us know

If you have co-owned a home before, or you looked at a co-ownership offer and walked away, we would love to hear why. We would also value your thoughts on where this approach would not work for you, and why.

Email me directly at dan@klasma.com. I read everything and I answer.

The rules that govern a home you buy are set in that home's operating agreement at closing, and change only through the vote and notice it defines. The model itself is still learning, and the next home benefits from what this one teaches us.

For how the number of owners changes what any of this is worth, see How Many Co-Owners Is Too Many?.

Night counts, tier boundaries and event dates in this article are the Suncadia Primary Calendar for 2026. They are specific to that property. Another home in another place would produce different numbers from the same rules. Buyers should read the scheduling rules in the operating agreement for any co-ownership they are considering.