I was just thinking of what a pain in the ass it is to deal with more space than a person or family really needs. Keeping seals in unused showers and toilets from drying out, keeping animals out of unused rooms, doing normal cleaning and maintenance on square footage that you actually don’t use, etc. This on top of the normal headaches of home ownership.
A mark of being ultra-rich is having multiple full-on houses across the country. Even some people who would be considered middle class may own a beach house or vacation condo in addition to a primary residence. Is it considered expected that if you can afford to own multiple homes, you can afford to employ someone to clean for you, come by and turn on your faucets once a month, etc? What about the constant need to outfit your home - when you buy silverware do you just buy 4 times as much for your 4 houses and ship it, or do you constantly shop for home goods every time you use one of the houses? How about consumable cleaning supplies etc? Does the third or fourth house that you spend two weeks a year in really feel like “home” or is it perpetually unfamiliar enough to just be staying in a bed and breakfast that you own?
Do people who work in cities and prefer to live far away still keep weeknight pied-a-terre apartments or did that go out with the three-martini lunch?
Especially in the era of covid I can see the appeal of keeping a home that is yours alone in places that you visit often and avoiding hotels, if you can afford such a thing, but I’m curious as to whether people who do it really think it’s worth it or are just showing off that they have that kind of money.
It doesn’t take a lot of money, at least not after the initial purchase of the property. I know several people with vacation homes, some just summer homes, others are maintained year round. They will own two whole sets of dishes and other kitchen utensils, but that’s something you accumulate over time, There is extra maintenance work to do, if you’re not into that then you better have some money. Your second home needs to be easy to weatherize and seal up for the times you won’t be there. It’s also a good idea to be friends with any neighbors you have.
For some people this takes almost nothing. I know someone with a summer beach house that is a tiny house with electricity, running water, and a septic tank. No heat, leaky windows, and 90% of what they need to live there comes and goes in the back of an SUV every year.
" According to the most recent census estimates, nearly six percent of American households own a second home, typically within 150 miles of their main residence.
Most of these second-home buyers are folks in their prime wage earning years who are looking for an escape from their work week realities or an investment - or both. Many of these second homes are located near recreation areas, bodies of water, or mountains."
Another reason for a second home is to have a winter home in a warmer climate. So you live in the Midwest in the spring, summer and fall and move to Florida or Arizona for winter–to avoid the brutal Midwestern winter weather.
Both my parents and I own multiple homes, although in their case it is inherited from each of their parents.
Its an annoyance to manage and ideally, you put it up for rent ASAP or at least some income-generating thing, but its not too difficult.
Weekenders / shacks on coastal or bush blocks are common in Australia, and called baches in NZ. People I know might have a local guy who comes and mows the lawns and keeps an eye on the place. Usually the furniture and furnishings are things like the old sofa and kitchen table from the main place and all-sorts of plate and cutlery, and vaguely musty blankets.
Since the rise of AirBnB some have gone online, but mainly its either the family, extended family/scroungers and mates who want a cheap fishing weekend. They are usually communally owned in the family, which can get ugly at times.
How often do folks buy silverware? I’m still using my hand-me-down stuff I got ~30 years ago.
I’m guessing when folks update stuff at their main house, the old stuff gets shifted to the secondary home.
When my mom died one of my sisters bought her house and uses it as a vacation place (it is in a tourist area) They pay someone to plow the driveway, but mow the (small) lawn themselves. Raking is big chore – They have paid to have it done or done it themselves depending on various factors.
My sister and her husband are retired so they stay there fairly regularly
Some secondary homes I know of are not heated – they require draining water from pipes in the fall.
We have a cabin in the mountains about 100 miles from our house in the city. We go there most weekends and since COVID, it’s been great to have a place where we can spread out a bit and relax. It’s not that hard to maintain.
This exactly. My father-in-law has a cottage and aside from a couple of couches that were bought new to furnish it, everything else is a cast off from his place in the city or ours. The cutlery is a set my wife and I bought 25 years ago that was replaced with a set we got as a wedding present. We are sleeping on my wife’s old bed from her apartment in university.
Yeah, pretty much everything in my cabin is stuff we already owned. The silverware was the silverware we used when we first got married. A lot of the furniture was in our attic as we replaced it with nicer things in our main house.
How is silverware a ‘constant need’? Everyone I know gets a ‘starter set’ either by buying it new, hitting a thrift store, or getting hand-me-downs from relatives, and then just keeps using it until it gets lost or damaged. They may buy/get a nice set for special occasions, and they may decide to get rid of a mismatched set eventually, but that’s a once a decade or less occurence, not a routine thing. For an beach house or cabin in the woods, you stock it either with ‘stuff you don’t want in the mean house’ or a bunch of cheap stuff from a discount or thrift store.
If you’ve got four houses and are constantly replacing silverware and dishes, you’ve probably got someone doing the buying and stocking for you anyway.
Big difference between middle class having 2 seasonal homes, or 1 primary and 1 vacation home - as opposed to superrich owning multiple fancy homes they jet between as their mood dictates.
We have a family cabin which is totally furnished w/ hand-me-downs and accumulations in terms of plates/silverware/furniture. We bring our own linens, and you assume there is not going to be the specific cleaning supplies, spices, paper goods, etc which you might wish. You either go without, or run to a local store. Someone closes it up after hunting season - tho it can be easily opened for a winter visit. And it is easy to open in the spring. So that is no big deal. A couple of locals check in on the property regularly when no one is using it.
The kind of rockstar/movie star/mogul lifestyle, w/ multiple mansions, impresses me as something quite different. I would imagine that MANY such people have them professionally decorated and appointed, and employ housekeeping/shopping support when in residence. When not using the home, I would imagine they either employ a fulltime housesitter or a management service to check in periodically.
What I imagine being a pain in the ass, more involves personal items. Do you pack all of your clothes/jewelry/sunglasses/toiletries/etc? - or do you have duplicates in each house? Similar if you have multiple cars - do you have a spare set of sunglasses and a phone charger in each one? Or keep them in a single bag that you bring in whatever car you are driving? A conundrum I have never needed to face. But ISTM that a large part of owning a house - as opposed to renting - is that all your STUFF is there with you, when you need it.
We have 1) our primary house in the city we both work(ed), 2) a second house in the small town 120 miles away where I live during the week while teaching at the local college, and 3) a house 4 hours away that we have had for over 20 years.
The second house is pretty small and is on a lake, which is nice, even though we don’t fish and we don’t even have a boat. Our daughter’s family uses it several times a year during weekends when I’m not there.
The third house was one we bought when our kids were in college, and was cheaper than paying rentals. It’s in Duluth Minnesota, and we used to use it as our vacation house when we visited the North Shore. We currently rent it (using a property management company). We keep with the maintenance on all of the houses, but at least on the rental we can deduct most of it as business expenses. We haven’t offered it for sale, mainly because 1 - Duluth has a housing shortage and the house prices keep rising (especially with lots of people considering working remotely), and 2 - our daughter would like to buy it and move to her favorite city.
We considered each a “necessity” at the time of purchase, and it’s paid off well since houses 2 and 3 values keep rising, so they are also kind of investments.
One thing that we do with our cabin is to keep it stocked with canned/frozen food, toiletries and clothes (it’s not like I need a Tux for the bears and deer); that way, we can just go there with no packing. I’ve done that after work when I was at the office, rather than go home, I just drove to the cabin and had what I needed.
We bought it because we were spending on rentals in a year around that area more than our mortgage.
I think just about everyone I know who owns a vacation place got started by getting a good deal on the property to start with. Sometimes it was inherited, others bought something run-down or did the initial development. I think it gets a little more difficult for the average person to afford something like this as real estate prices climb over the years, especially if they want to be by the water. But these places can be good investments just like any other piece of real estate, a very good investment for people who will enjoy using the place.
The problem w/ our place is that multiple people use it. So just because you left something there, doesn’t mean it will be there when you return. Instead, there will be yet another broken lamp! (Folks - if it didn’t work at home, it won’t work at the cabin!)
We had large cabinets that each family could lock and keep cabin specific things in - like lake toys.
When we were thinking of buying our cabin, my wife’s aunt was suggesting that maybe she’d go in with us, but I gently pushed back. I wanted it to be ours and ours only. At one point we were thinking about renting it out every once in a while, but the more we fix it up exactly how we like it, the less I like the idea of someone messing with it.