New York Magazine
January 24,2006
You’ve Won a Free Week in New York!
Time-shares in Manhattan? They do exist—and even the Plaza is
offering a (very highbrow) version.
By S.Jhoanna Robledo
 Real-estate
obsessive were tickled when word spread recently that the remade
Plaza hotel would be offering
“hotel-condos”—apartments sold to buyers for up to four months out
of the year. The arrangement effectively
amounts to a time-share, a term that sounds a lot more Acapulco
than it does Fifth Avenue. As one poster on Curbed.com joked, “I
suppose there will be tee shirts that
say, MY RICH PRENTS STAYED IN THEIR CONDO/TIMESHARE AT THE PLAZA
IN NEW YORK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEE SHIRT.”
Courtesy of Fairmount Hotels & Resorts
But even aside from the Plaza, luxury time-shares do exist in
Manhattan. Most serve as pied-à-terre alternatives that don’t
require buyers to part with the million bucks now required for an
average Manhattan apartment and take on the hassles of ownership.
“You don’t pay full price, but you also don’t have the headaches
of finding tenants and keeping it up,” says Corcoran’s Pamela
Parrish, who’s often shown time-shares to clients. (The Plaza’s
apartments aren’t technically time-shares, since the hotel does
the renting when you’re not there.)
At the Manhattan Club, a West 56th Street building that adheres
more closely to the time-share model, a representative who asked
not to be named confirmed that members paid between $40,000 and
$55,000 last year for weeklong stays in its 24 new suites. The
average price for a fractional condo at the high-end Phillips Club
on West 66th Street, the only other time-share in the city, is
quite a bit more: $350,000 for a 1,500-square-foot two-bedroom,
says director Ed Schnatterly. Visitors there tend to stay longer,
averaging 47 nights a year, and prices include use of the nearby
Reebok Sports Club, plus other services, when residents are in
town.
Oddly, Manhattan time-share owners—and they are indeed owners,
since properties are deeded and can be bought and sold like any
others—tend to live nearby. At the Phillips Club, roughly 20
percent of them come from within a 75-mile radius; at the
Manhattan Club, “a majority of our owners live within 90 miles,”
says the Manhattan Club’s spokeswoman, Melody Andres. Many are
empty-nesters who head into the city for a little bit of fun and
don’t want to face the long drive home. “We’re not as young as we
used to be,” says Tony Mangione, of East Northport, on Long
Island, who with his wife, Teresa, stays at the Manhattan Club.
“It feels like our apartment building, only we have it just two
weeks a year.”
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