Why I am building Klasma
By Dan Barker · June 1, 2026
I bought a vacation home to create memories with my family.
For the past three years, my family has owned a second home in Suncadia, a resort in Eastern Washington. It has given us more time together and more memories than I can count.
It also taught me some hard, expensive lessons.
I'm Dan Barker, the founder of Klasma. I am building a company to help other families capture the magic of second-home ownership, without making the mistakes I did.
The dream
When my wife and I bought the home, our girls were 7 and 10, and we spent a lot of time making the home exactly how we wanted it. We also decided that we would not rent it out while unused. We would allow close friends and family to use the home, but we did not want it to be a publicly used short-term rental. We had put too much into making the place ours to live with the wear that strangers bring. We wanted to make the most of the time we had left with our children at home, and we had a clear picture of how the next few years would look. We imagined:
- Everyone under one roof. Grandparents, cousins, and extended family together.
- Something for every season. Skating and tubing in winter. Swimming, biking, and golf in summer.
- One constant place. The spot our girls would always tie to being together as they grew up.
For a while, we got exactly that. It was everything we hoped for.
Then I learned what no one tells you about owning a vacation home.
The friction no one talks about
The home sits empty, but the costs never do. I planned to use it eight weeks a year. We managed about three. The mortgage, the taxes, the insurance, and the upkeep do not care how many nights you sleep there. You pay for all 52 weeks and use a handful.
A second home is a second job. I thought I could handle the maintenance, the landscaping, and the repairs myself. I was wrong. One home is plenty to keep up. Two, with one of them 75 minutes away, is a job I badly underestimated.
The calendar fights back. As the girls got older, their activities filled every weekend. My wife works in an office five days a week, so we could not leave until Friday evening and had to be home by Sunday night. Even bringing the dog and the cat turned a quick trip into a logistics project.
We loved every minute we spent there. We just could not spend nearly as many as we planned. The math stopped matching the memories. Here is what that actually looked like.
The numbers
Home purchased in May 2023 for $2.5 million.
There are two ways to buy a home like this, and the gap in what you need up front is the part most people underestimate.
| Getting in | Up front | Then |
|---|---|---|
| All cash (what I did) | $2.5 million | Operating costs only |
| Financed, 20% down | $500,000 down | ~$14,500/mo PITI on the $2M loan |
I paid cash, so the mortgage figures below are the illustrative financed view at 20% down and 7.25%.
Here is 2025. Every square is a night I paid for.
We used the home 20 nights in 2025. The mortgage, the taxes, the insurance, and the upkeep ran all 365.
Divide one year of cost by the nights we actually slept there and you get the number that changed how I think about second homes.
It did not get better as we settled in. It got worse.
2023 covers May through December only, so it is not a like-for-like comparison with the two full years. Between 2024 and 2025 the annual cost held flat at $198,000 while we used the home four fewer nights.
›See the full numbers
| Item | May 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Major projects | Home purchase, furnishings | Furnishings, garage enhancements | Built-in grill, hot tub decking and fence |
| Project costs (capital) | $5,000 | $65,000 | $55,000 |
| Usage | 17 days | 24 days | 20 days |
| PITI at 7.25% ($14,500/mo) | $87,000 | $174,000 | $174,000 |
| Operating cost, net of taxes & insurance ($2,000/mo) | $14,000 | $24,000 | $24,000 |
| Total annual cost (PITI + operating) | $101,000 | $198,000 | $198,000 |
| Cost per night with mortgage | $5,941 | $8,250 | $9,900 |
| Cost per night without mortgage | $824 | $1,000 | $1,200 |
Operating cost excludes property taxes and insurance, which are already included in PITI. Project costs are capital improvements, shown separately and not included in the annual total. Purchase price paid in cash, so the "without mortgage" row reflects my actual out-of-pocket on an annual basis.
Financing looks cheaper, but it isn't. The capital is not free on either path. Paying cash, I have $2.5 million sitting in the home instead of invested. At 4%, that is about $100,000 a year in returns I am giving up. Financing only shrinks the door fee, to $500,000 from $2.5 million. That down payment still costs about $20,000 a year in forgone returns, and the mortgage adds roughly $145,000 in interest in the first year alone. A smaller down payment, not a smaller cost.
What I've learned
- Operating costs are high, and so are the opportunity costs. Even without a mortgage, the home runs roughly $36,000 per year all-in (including taxes and insurance). The bigger cost is the capital tied up in it, which I break down in the numbers above.
- Our usage was lower than I anticipated. Industry data shows most second-home owners use their property 6 weeks or less per year. We've used ours even less than that.
- ROI was lower than I anticipated. Even with the best intentions and a drive under 2 hours, we couldn't use the property as much as I planned. Measured in trips and memories, the return has been lower than I hoped.
- Proximity matters a lot. I had considered buying a vacation home in Scottsdale, Arizona, which would have required airfare to use. I'm glad I didn't. It would have made our family's ability to use the home even harder and more expensive.
- I didn't know about co-ownership. I didn't know you could own 25% of a deeded home, a real stake you can sell like any other real estate. Real ownership, for about a quarter of the cost.
Here is what that would have meant for this exact home.
Same home, a quarter of the cost. A stake is priced at a quarter of the home's value, with no premium and no Klasma fee on the sale. Financed, the down payment falls from $500,000 to about $125,000. For a family using the home three weeks a year, the math finally matches the usage.
Why I'm building Klasma
There is a gap between the dream of a vacation home and the reality of owning one. Most families either get priced out, or buy in and inherit a headache. It should not be this hard to build a place for your family to come back to.
That is why I founded Klasma. The cost of real estate has risen sharply over the last few years. For a buyer in 2026, the monthly cost of owning the same home has more than doubled since 2020. Prices are up 55%, and mortgage rates roughly doubled. Full ownership of a home you'll use four to six weeks a year was a stretch at the old numbers. At today's numbers, it's hard to justify.
Co-ownership changes the math. You own a quarter of a deeded home, for about a quarter of the cost, and what you pay finally matches how much you use it.
My goal is to make Klasma the most thorough and accurate source of co-ownership information anywhere. I want to give you everything I wish I had known before I bought, so you can make the best decision for your family.
A plain-language explanation of fractional home ownership and how it differs from the old timeshare model.