Living in hotels has long been a favourite pastime of the rich and famous. Howard Hughes stayed in the Beverly Hills Hotel on and off in the 1950s;paying $350,000 a year (about ₤ 1.3m by today’s standards) for three bungalows. He insisted on having his roast-beef sandwiches left in the fork of a tree in the garden so he could collect them unseen. This is the kind of quirky demand you can mate when paying for a life of luxury in a hotel So there is some precedent for the latest trend in holiday homes buying a suite in a hotel so you get guaranteed rooms, five-star room service and all the amenities of a top-grade holiday hotel. And you can even avoid international-hotel-blandness-syndrome and have your suite fitted out to your specification. The Kempinski Resort hotel in Estepona, near Marbella, southern Spain, may not leave steak sandwiches in a tree, but it will offer a swimming pool, sauna, massages, cleaning and laundry service, hairdresser, gym, restaurants and much more to tempt would-be purchasers of its apartments. And when not staying there, you can always get the hotel to rent out the apartment for you. “Marbella is a great spot, but it can be hard to get a good hotel when you want it”, says Richard Hunter, a semi-retired property consultant from Wiltshire, who owns an apartment in the Kempinski. “We find the hotel could let our apartment out several times over for the weeks we’re not here. For my wife and I, it was a natural choice. We wanted somewhere that was always ready and that somebody else had responsibility for, but that was also more of a home than just a hotel room. It has worked really well”. K. S. is a Marbella-based agent that specialises in the top end of the market. It is selling a four-bedroom villa in the luxurious MarbelIa Club hotel for ₤ l.8m. “It is a relatively small plot” explains T. Hagemeister. one of its directors, “but it does have its own swimming pool and the buyer will have complete use of all the club's facilities. Hagemeister claims that the German-owned Kempinski Hotel was the first to offer apartments for sale with hotels in Marbella. The concept is booming. “We have been surprised at the broad range buyers”, she says. “Everybody from young people looking to get into the market because of the rental opportunities to older people who like the concept because of the services side”. The Kempinski-run apartments she has on her books include one- two and three bedroom suites, sold fully furnished and ready for immediate occupation. All of them are in a private wing that can either be accessed via the hotel itself through the grand lobby, or by separate private entrances. Owners have access to all the Kempinski’s five-star facilities. Prices range from ₤ 258,000 to ₤ 380,000. In the Las Dunas Hotel, another five-stars Marbella spa resort that also houses a two-star Michelin restaurant, a three-bed apartment will cost you about ₤880,000. At the soon-to-be completed Guadalpin, prices range from ₤ 245,000 for a one-bedroom apartment to ₤ 605,000 for a three-bedder. The maintenance fees will start at ₤ 283 a month and cover use of all the hotel facilities, including the spa. A fully furnished and equipped holiday resort borne you visit quite rarely could sound suspiciously like a timeshare deal, but there is a legal difference between timeshare and owning an apartment or villa in a hotel. With a timeshare, you only have a legal title to the property during the particular times for which you have the timeshare. With the hotel deal, you have all the rights of an owner all the time. Timeshare is a considerably cheaper option, but only gives you certain weeks a year when you are entitled to stay in the property. With most hotel suites, you have the right to go whenever you want to and to rent it out when it suits you. But what are your rights if the hotel goes bust or changes ownership? “You should still have freehold ownership of the property”, says Robin Chapman, a lawyer and property developer, "though you could be in trouble if the services were to be cut off”. These sorts of properties generally change hands before anything so drastic happens, according to Chapman. “In Marbella, there is never any problem with letting the apartments out”, claims Hagemeister. "And most of the hotels offer a 100-day-a-year letting service that more than covers the running costs. People are really taken with the whole idea. I think the combination of covering costs, having fue hotel services at your disposal - often at a 15% to 20% discount - and being able to call it borne is a winner. It is becoming more and more popular. We now, have a waiting list of people looking for places like this”. Marbella may claim to have invented the hotel-as-holiday-home concept, but it has now spread all over the world. At the Amanpuri hotel complex in Phuket, Thailand, there are 30 villas linked to the hotel. Amanpuri, meaning “place of peace” in Thai, is built on a coastal hillside overlooking Phuket. The villas are all set in a large plot of land that gives , them the feeling of being remote, but not isolated. Each air-conditioned villa comes with between two and six bedrooms, living and dining rooms, and a private swimming pool that ranges in size from 8m to 20m. Depending on how much you are prepared to spend, extras include a gym, a spa bath and a choice of children's play accessories such as slides and swings. The villas are all furnished with Thai art and antiques and there is a live-in maid and cookery service. Villa owners have full access to all Amanpuri resort services and facilities. When the villas were originally built, between six and 10 years ago, they were sold for between ₤ 1m and ₤ l.5m. All resales are handled discreetly and the few private resales that have taken place have been in the ₤1.5m to ₤ 3m range. Some buyers prefer to hang on to the villas and rent them out in order to recover costs. William Pinsent is , the managing director of the property constancy and developer Phuket Land: “I think a lot of people bought these luxury villas without thinking about the service charges, which are significant. And a lot of them were only there one week a year. Now they are subscribing to the management schemes, letting the hotels manage the properties and covering the service costs with the rental income”. A four-bedroom villa can be let out for up to ₤ 2,250 per day. But according to Pinsent, there is a downside. “I’m finding that what people want now is proper villas, places that can eventually become full-time homes when they retire”, he says. “Most of the hotels here do not allow you to personalise your home, and you have to abide by the quite strict rules of the letting scheme”. The St James’s Club, Antigua, which has a large resort hotel, had more than 90 villas for sale, 74 in a village on Maroora Bay and 15 land plots on the hill above. Most have been sold to buyers from America”, and the British Isles. Robin Chapman bought one of the villas and liked the place so much that he ended up developing a neighbouring resort called Savannah Antigua. He says that the key is that owners are able to personalise their villas, surrounding themselves with borne paraphernalia. Without that, he says, all they’ve done is lease a couple of hotel rooms on appalling terms. “Some obvious rules apply”, says Chapman. “The satisfied buyers are generally the ones who have been coming to the Caribbean for a decade and know the island already. Old money lasts the course. New money much less so. New money buys on the basis of a self-serving deceit that, they bought an investment and then sells - amid howls of foul play and conspiracy - when they find it is not the case”. Chapman also ,thinks that people overestimate how much time they will spending such a place. "The first year, they go for two weeks. The second year, for one week. The third year, they begin to wonder why they bought the thing in the first place. Only buy in the Caribbean if you mean to spend the entire winter there for 10 years ahead”, he says.

Questions or Comments? klein@kleinandpartner.com

<< Back