The trials of owning vacation homes

For the past month, we’ve been focusing on summer vacations. Not ours, mind you, but those of very rich people and the houses they inhabit during those vacations.

We have cover stories in this issue on the getaway homes of real estate moguls, a package on the top Hamptons residential sales of this year, a look at the biggest brokerages on the East End and a story on Mitt Romney’s real estate holdings (mostly vacation homes).

For those unfortunate souls who can’t get out of the city, we also have a story devoted to NYC pools (see By the numbers). If you are one of those people sticking around the city, don’t get upset: There are lots of “rich people problems” that come with owning a second home. (Full disclosure: I am renting a modest home on the North Fork for part of the summer.)

The first rich-person problem, of course, is the pain of getting there. Hamptons traffic is notoriously bad. Sure, you can spend a few thousand dollars on a helicopter, but after a while that can get boring. Real estate developer and hotelier Andre Balazs (who owns the Sunset Beach hotel and restaurant on Shelter Island) has a more stylish solution: He takes his seaplane from East 23rd Street in Manhattan, flying low over the water out to the East End, then touches down gently 75 feet from shore, rolls up his pants and wades his way to the Shelter Island beach. Getting around in such a fashion, I guess it’s not surprising that Balazs — who co-owns a seaplane company — also has a hip take on real estate.

A bigger rich-person problem is deciding which home to go to in the first place. On page 28, we look at Mitt Romney’s real estate. The Republican presidential hopeful has had a lot of choices of where to vacation over the years — with homes in California, New Hampshire, Utah and Ontario, Canada. I’m sure all of his homes are nice and that just being home is a luxury when he’s normally out on the road campaigning — as long as he remembers not to leave that dog strapped to the top of the campaign bus. (That now-famous Romney gaffe was like a scene out of the Chevy Chase movie “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” And pundits are now saying that Romney has followed that up with his own version of “European Vacation” after his Olympics gaffe in London.)

Another serious problem for those with vacation homes is that you have to buy two of everything. Two copies of every book you’re reading, two pairs of eyeglasses, two of each item in your wardrobe; otherwise, the moment you need something, you realize it’s in the other house. Surely, a personal concierge company could launch a service that replicates the contents of your primary residence for your vacation home as part of its business plan. (Whoever actually does this first can send me a check at the address listed on the masthead.)

Finally, having a personal driver is sometimes a pain. There is lots of coordination that has to happen and sometimes a cab is easier. I ran into World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein and his wife at the baggage claim at Newark International Airport last year as they were waiting for a car, which got held up in traffic. I hopped on the taxi-stand line and left in a second. I felt terrible.

Obviously, being enormously wealthy can be tough.

But enough of these (faux) summertime blues. On a more serious note, elsewhere in the issue, we have a package on what real estate brokerage firms are doing right — and wrong — online, in terms of luring clients. We also have a story on 666 Fifth Avenue, which the Kushners bought at the height of the market for a record $1.8 billion. It looked like a dicey deal for a while, but we detail the turnaround and estimate what each investor earned.

We also look at the landscape for residential brokers — who, of course, are classified as independent contractors — when it comes to health insurance, and how things might change as a result of the Supreme Court’s big health care decision. Mitt Romney might disagree, but it seems like you shouldn’t need to be a very rich person to see a doctor when you get sick.