Overnight News: If you’re searching BloodhoundBlog for Pacaso – I’m your huckleberry.

I told my wife that Pacaso is bragging about having a million visitors to their web site since they launched last October. She is web- but not dev-savvy. Even so, her instant retort: “What’s the bounce rate?”

You lead with your best card. Pacaso isn’t bragging about sales, nor even about significant web-engagement with one-percenters, its sole client base. Instead, it’s touting a meaningless gawker stat – in a press release about a change to the iBuyer’s pay-plan.

That last bit matters: Pay-plans change when business models underperform, with the goal being either to squeeze out more juice per deal or simply to juice more deals – ideally at no cost. Pacaso’s bold new incentive is the latter kind: They will gladly pay you someday in stock that may or may not have any value for a – closed – lead today.

This is me noodging founder Spencer Rascoff on LinkedIn – a place where anyone can ask hard questions and no one does:

I figured out where the web traffic is coming from. Your enemies seem likely to proliferate.

Are the homes on the web site all of those you have purchased, so far? I count twenty available properties. Are there more?

How many closed end-user sales have you made to date? Fewer than a hundred? Fewer than twenty?

Every good salesman knows to sniff around when the pay-plan changes. I thought you were wrong – about the fundamental nature of all known organisms – on day zero. Has the marketplace proved me a fool? Or are you trading promises of future equity for leads?

Capitalized to $90 million, claims to be be worth a billion, claims to be profitable – but again Pacaso only brags about web site visitors.

None of this has ever smelled right to me: Organisms-as-such – not just people, not just mammals – share happily only within their own storgic groups: Pack, clan, kin-group. Storge is Greek; it denotes the enduring love of families, among the distinguishable types of love. Absent storgic love, the shared use and enjoyment of anything will almost always result in conflict. Most people don’t share ownership with strangers, and most of those who do come to regret it.

So my take all along is that Pacaso has never had a business. The idea appealed to VC-encysted geeks because they are the most socially-isolated queen bees ever to exist. The notion is repellent to normal people for the same reason that sharing anything among strangers is repellent.

But I didn’t see things from the neighbors’ point-of-view. At least in California’s wine country, there is significant local opposition to Pacaso for bringing in carpet-baggers and pricing out the locals. All of the iBuyers are bad neighbors – and potentially catastrophic neighbors – but Pacaso had the financial acumen and “Unicorn” brilliance to pick multiple real estate fights with the some of the richest, best-represented people in America.

What this “Unicorn” needs is a real Unicorn: Not just a buyer with a ringing testimonial (not found on the web site), but a multi-buyer. A time-share is a hotel room you claim to own sometimes and can never, ever get rid of. The only sane way to buy a “second-home” you can’t use all the time is to buy multiple time-shares: The beach, the mountains, the singing, soaring Sonoran. If they could produce a steady stream of buyers that dumb sagacious, they might have a business.

My bet is that they have an exit-strategy, instead. Should Pacaso turn out to be an absolutely worthless “investment” – puffed up out of nothing to sucker its future shareholders for the benefit of friends-of-Zillow early stakeholders – then maybe we will learn something about iBuyers, securities “investments” and the predatory approach to business.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: Pending Sales Continue to Slow—Still Up 29% from 2020.

CNBC: A massive wave of evictions could be coming. Who’s at risk?

Reuters: U.S. Supreme Court urged by 22 states to maintain eviction ban.

Associated Press: Law enforcement struggles to recruit since killing of George Floyd.

Tyler O’Neil: Parents Are Revolting, Teachers Are Resigning, and Critical Race Theory Is to Blame.