Phoenix writer is launching a platform to help you buy properties in Italy's rural villages

Let's go back in time a bit to 2006, when Phoenix writer Julie Hampton was a grad student and wanted to buy an $80,000 house in a small Italian town about an hour and a half outside of Florence.

But, she didn’t have $80,000. So she came up with a scheme that was pretty novel at the time: She asked family, friends and even complete strangers to invest.

Give her a little money toward purchasing her dream home, and she’d give you a future stay in it. If that sounds a lot like crowdfunding today, that’s because it is — before crowdfunding was a thing, of course.

Fast-forward to today, and Hampton is at it again. This time, with the launch of Myborgo.co — a crowdfunding platform where you can do the same thing — and help revive nearly empty villages in rural Italy.

It’s set to launch later this year and The Show spoke with Hampton more about it.

Full conversation

JULIE HAMPTON: I think it goes back to me living in Wisconsin. We had Amish community in Wisconsin, and so I knew about barn raising. And there was something really amazing about all these people coming together in the community to help build their neighbor’s barn in a day.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

JULIE HAMPTON: And so, I think that kind of translated to this idea of crowdfunding. Like, how can I provide a great experience for somebody and then have them give me money ahead of time?

LAUREN GILGER: Ahead of time. Because you needed the money to buy the place. Yes.

JULIE HAMPTON: I did! I did! It was essentially a prepayment of a vacation rental, essentially.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, you were guaranteeing these folks, like, if you give me $1,000 or more, or whatever you want to for this, I’ll make sure that you can stay in this beautiful Italian house however many times a year.

JULIE HAMPTON: Exactly.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And that’s essentially the same idea you’re bringing to this new business, which we’ll get to in a moment.

But talk about trying to make this happen when this wasn’t really something that people ever had heard of. How did it work? How’d it go?

JULIE HAMPTON: Well, I kind of knew in my gut that this was something that could work. And, you know, I sought out different advice from different places and got some kind of bad advice and sort of discouragement, which only fueled me to prove them wrong.

But then I found a great lawyer who helped me set up my LLC and then create the contract that I was going to give to the people who gave me money, so that they knew I was legit. Because I did put an ad in The New York Times. And so half the people I knew and half the people I didn’t know. So, I had conversations with the people from the ad just so that they knew I was reliable and the money wasn’t so much that they were risking a ton.

And, you know, at the time, there wasn’t access to these places, these villages, these small villages. Now, of course, we have Airbnb. But at the time, that didn’t exist, and so this really created an opportunity for people to sort of experience authentic Italy and these small villages. There’s like 150 people that live in this village. So, it just takes you to kind of another world.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And something they would not have had access to otherwise. I’m guessing there’s no hotel in town, right?

JULIE HAMPTON: No, there’s not even a restaurant.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So tell us about the village where you have a house now in Italy. You’ve been going there for how long?

JULIE HAMPTON: 25 years. This summer, July 17 is the 25th anniversary of me — the purchase. I’m going to go back, and my neighbor offered to host a little party to celebrate, so we’re going to do that.

It’s a little town called Vitiana. It’s in Tuscany. It’s kind of just north of Lucca and east of the coast. It’s about a 15-minute switchback drive up the road from the valley and just gives you incredible views.

LAUREN GILGER: Amazing.

JULIE HAMPTON: So, after the pandemic, I really started to meet all the other expats in the village, and there’s quite a few from, we have people from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Australia, England. It’s really — it’s really quite a amazing space of kind of international flavor.

LAUREN GILGER: So, you’re not the only expat who has found this place. That’s amazing. And it’s because there’s a lot of real estate available in towns like this, it turns out.

JULIE HAMPTON: That’s what that’s what we’re finding. So, when I just finished my MBA, and we were paired up for different projects, and I happened to pair up with a woman named Giorgia Lugarini. And you can imagine with a name like that, she’s Italian.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

JULIE HAMPTON: And we started talking, and we’re like, "Oh, Italy." So, we started saying, "Oh, I have a holiday home there." And she’s like, "I do, too." She asked me where it was, and I was like, "Oh, you’re probably not going to know." Well, it turns out our houses are within 30 minutes of each other in Italy.

LAUREN GILGER: No way.

JULIE HAMPTON: Which we thought was super, super serendipitous.

LAUREN GILGER: Right.

JULIE HAMPTON: So, we met over spring break when we were both in Italy, and we had an Aperol Spritz at halfway between at this bar, and I told her the story of how I bought, bought my house, and she’s like, "We need to make this our project. This needs to be our capstone project." Which is what we ...

LAUREN GILGER: And now it’s a business, yeah.

JULIE HAMPTON: And now it’s a business. Yeah, so we had some help on the capstone project to help us kind of formalize it. But, I mean, part of it is really solving the problem of depopulation in Italy. You know, tourism is up in these big cities like Venice, Rome, and Milan and Florence.

But when you look at these smaller towns, they’re actually losing people because of aging, lack of job prospects. And so, a lot of these homes are sitting empty. And they’re affordable homes, that’s what I think a lot of people don’t realize. When you hear of Tuscany, you think, "Oh, I’m totally priced out."

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.

JULIE HAMPTON: But you can find houses for €60,000 in these places that are move-in ready. I mean, 2025, the National Association of Realtors reported that first-time home buyers is down to 21%. That’s huge.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Right, it can be very hard now to buy a house in the U.S. But in Italy, you’re saying the barrier to entry is lower and lower.

JULIE HAMPTON: Sure. I mean, there’s certain hurdles you have to, you know, you have to overcome in terms of like there’s a little bit of bureaucracy everywhere. But that’s what we hope to do is to guide people through the process, because we’ve been through it. We can kind of take people through those steps and connect them to the realtors who are vetting these properties to make sure that they’re move-in ready, there’s no big renovations that need to be done. Most Italian homes are sold with their furniture, so you really can move in immediately.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. OK, so explain a little bit about how this will work. It’s not launched yet. It’s called MyBorgo.co. And the idea is essentially what you did to buy your place in Italy, but now much more formalized. You’ll walk people through this, right?

JULIE HAMPTON: Yeah, it’s taking kind of the old-school process I did 25 years ago of, you know, sort of checks and like doing everything through the mail, and a little bit through email, is really building a crowdfunding platform.

I call it a kind of a cross between Zillow, Kickstarter and Airbnb. Imagine those three had a baby, and MyBorgo is their offspring. So, there’s a section where where aspiring owners can browse properties that have been pre-vetted as move-in ready. Then, once they secure a proposta d’acquisto, which is the reservation offer essentially, then they can host a campaign on our site and invite people, backers we call them, to sort of reserve time at the home, and that’s really what will generate the capital needed to purchase the home.

LAUREN GILGER: So, there’s no debt involved here, not as much red tape, right? Because you’ll do a lot of that for them, it sounds like.

JULIE HAMPTON: Exactly.

LAUREN GILGER: So, I have to ask you, since since you’ve been going to this same village for 25 years, you obviously you’re not the only expat there. I mean, like, what do the locals, you know, these very few people who left in these villages, what do they think about you, about other people from all over the world coming and sort of using their little towns as as like a vacation spot? Do they like it or are they frustrated by it?

JULIE HAMPTON: I think one of the things, too, is we consider the villages are a partner. So, we we are going to villages where there are available homes, and making sure that these the village elders or the local residents welcome this kind of investment in their town.

For the most part, we find that many of them do. They want to see their villages come alive. They want the economic stimulus that these visitors will bring. Like, in Vitiana, it comes alive in the summer. They put on dinners in the piazza for 200 people and have a band. I mean, we pay we all pay like €20 to do that, but it’s just an incredible moment of community coming together.

LAUREN GILGER: That sounds beautiful. All right. Good luck with it. That is Julie Hampton, a Phoenix writer, now the co-founder of MyBorgo.co, which will launch later this year. Julie, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

JULIE HAMPTON: Oh, thanks for having me, Lauren.