Just for the hell of it, I was looking at the cost of beachfront condos in Daytona Beach, Florida. Well whaddyaknow, I found literally hundreds like this one. IOW, a whole bunch of 400-500 square-foot condos in beachfront buildings, with prices in the $40,000-$60,000 range.
As you can see from the listing, at 400 square feet with a range and oven, this condo is basically a hotel suite (with a $48,900 price tag). In fact, I gather that the property management sells these condos as vacation homes and rents them (giving the homeowners a cut, of course) to tourists when not occupied.
Here’s the question: If I wanted to, could I actually buy this condo and live here 365 days a year? Move in my own furnishings? Hook up a satellite dish? Would I have to pay the electric bill? Would I get daily maid service (assuming the tourists get it when they rent these rooms)? Granted, 400 square feet is, to quote Genie from Aladdin, “itty bitty living space,” but unless you have hundreds of G’s to wave around you’re not going to get a house on the beach.
Do people actually do this (live in wee little hotel/condos for the sake of affordable beachfront living)?
DISCLAIMER: I use Daytona Beach, Florida as an example in this thread because that’s the only beachfront community I’d be interested in living in. I’m sure the beachfront real estate market is different in other beachfront communities.
Yes, this is a condo, not a timeshare, so you can live there year round. You furnish it yourself, pay all the bills, maid service is typically not included.
Many people use them as vacation homes and do turn them over to a management firm to rent out when they are not using them. If so, you could probably use their maid service, but they would charge you for it.
The furnishings, unless the listing states otherwise, are provided by the owner. That’s you!
Unless the condo owners’ association forbids it, sure! I can imagine any number of renters who’d enjoy having satellite TV in case it rained during their beach week.
All bills associated with running the property are expenses that are (nearly) always borne by the owner (again, that’s you!) in beach-rental deals. The owner chooses how much to shell out for additional perks, knowing that he’s going to have to pass these costs on to the renters. In short, the owner decides how badly his renters will want those perks.
You’re not likely to get maid service daily. Most rental deals in the beach town I grew up in (Bethany Beach, DE) are of the “you clean it” variety, with maids employed as “invisible” room service. Maids come in when the renters leave on Saturday morning at 10 a.m., and the place is spotless by noon, when the next week’s renters show up. The realtor usually arranges (as a service to the owner) for the maid service to do one block of their properties, each with slightly different turnover times, so a team of four or five maids can do many many houses on Saturday and Sunday. Since their time is at a premium, they don’t clean houses on the middle weekend of a two-week stay.
Pretty much every arrangement you can think of in terms of owning, renting, and actually inhabiting a given property at the beach has been tried–mostly because the properties are so desirable.
I’ll digress into my mostly-relevant example:
A friend of mine who had a teaching job in our area moved to the area from Baltimore. She intended to live in our area for only 9 months out of the year, but all of the inland properties were renting for 12-month leases, period. When under one of these leases, subletting to a different group of city folk for each week in the vacation season is frowned on, to say the least.
So… she worked out an arrangement with the owners of a small cottage to live there for the duration of the school year, pay all the bills, and keep the place in good shape. Her rent was actually slightly lower than it would have been inland because vacation properties are so slim on amenities! She moved back to Baltimore for the summer, giving the owners the opportunity to rent the cottage (at summer rates) for the other two and a half months of the year.
It was cheaper for her to rent for 9 months at the beach than for 12 inland. The owners got an extra 9 months’ rent out of their property, and someone to look after it during the winter. Everyone won!
My other example:
My dad bought a lot and built a house on it in Bethany back when prices were “swampland” low. He rented it out in the summer where he could, but blocked off two weeks that we could come down for vacation. When he and my mom were both laid off from their teaching jobs upstate in the early 80s, they finished out the lease on the upstate apartment and then moved downstate to the house they owned. That’s where I grew up–living in a beach house that was press-ganged into being a full-time residence.
I am in SoCal, and I can tell you that some people will put up with just about anything to live at the beach. Before it was torn down & rebuilt, the house next door to my parents was only 900 sf, and used as a full-time residence by the last three owners!
And in my parent’s generation, kids were raised in that house!
It can be done, and the trade off is worth it to many people.
PS- the last time it sold, that little 900 sf house on the town’s main street, three houses back from the sand with no garage, sold for over $600K.