Rawther Part-Time Plaza

For Mere Millions, a Glamour Condo With a Difference

The iconic Plaza Hotel in New York opened sales today of 152 hotel condominium hotel suites. Buyers can own "a piece of The Plaza" for as little as $1.6 million. (Photo: Business Wire) (Business Wire)

NEW YORK -- Oooooooooooh. If you absolutely love the Plaza the way Eloise loves the Plaza you should hear about this deal because you could move there too and it's absolutely expensive.

Here's what you'd have to do: Pay $1.6 million or even $9 million and you'd get your very own hotel room furnished and renovated and with maid service and you could stay there whenever you wanted but no more than 120 days a year. Wouldn't that be absolutely fabulous?

Charge it, please.

The owners of Manhattan's Plaza Hotel this week began selling 152 "hotel condos" to real estate buyers with fantasies of sharing a roof with the famously impish children's book character.

For just $1.6 million to $9 million, buyers can own their very own furnished hotel room -- ranging from a studio to a duplex penthouse -- in the soon-to-be-renovated and reopened hotel located at the southeast corner of Central Park.

The condos come with all the trappings of a top-drawer hotel: maid service, room service, even a chandelier in the bathroom.

But there's a catch: Owners can use their new home only 120 days a year. The rest of the time, the condos will be rented out to paying guests through the Plaza's reservation system alongside the 130 ordinary hotel rooms. The condo owners get the revenue -- minus the hotel's expenses and a management fee.

"There are so many potential buyers who would like to buy a piece of the Plaza but they are not intending to use it as the their primary residence," said Miki Naftali, president of Elad Properties, which owns the landmark property.

Naftali points out that while the prices on the hotel condos may sound high to non-New Yorkers, for the Plaza, they're a bargain.

Elad is also offering 182 "private residences" in the building for sale for anywhere from $2.5 million to about $40 million. For that money, owners get traditional unfurnished condos offering full-time ownership and views of Central Park and Fifth Avenue.

The hotel condos, located in the building's southern half facing 58th Street or the backs of other buildings, are more of "an entry point to the Plaza," Naftali said.

Most of the hotel condos (the cheaper ones, at between 500 and 600 square feet) don't even have kitchenettes. Instead they have minibars, and if an owner happens to have a whim to heat up his own soup rather than ordering it from room service, there are butlers on every floor standing by with portable stovetops. The rooms do have other amenities, though: custom-designed furniture, a hidden flat panel TV that looks like a mirror until you turn it on, and a wireless panel with a button you can use to call for your car. You can watch for the car to arrive via closed circuit television.

Real estate experts not connected to the project predict the Plaza's hotel condos will do well.

"You're not just buying a piece of property, you're buying a piece of history," said Lisa Maysonet, a Manhattan real estate broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman. "The hotel condo product serves a unique clientele: They can own, they can come, they can enjoy and they can leave. . . . It's maintenance-free," because the hotel staff takes care of the upkeep.

The concept of a condo hotel has been around for a long time. Unlike time shares or fractional ownership arrangements, owners buy their units outright. They then bring in income -- or at least defray some of their costs -- by putting their units into the hotel's rental pool when they aren't using them. The units are generally furnished like traditional hotel rooms but have a locked "owners closet" where personal belongings can be stored.

Condo hotel projects have taken off in recent years, fueled by low interest rates and baby boomers looking for low-maintenance second homes. Right now, 144 American condo-hotel projects are either under construction or in the planning stages, up from 132 in the first quarter, said Pat Ford, president of Lodging Econometrics, a New Hampshire firm that just began tracking the category. None of them is in the Washington area.

Most of the projects are either in resort destinations -- beach communities, ski resorts, theme-park areas -- or in center cities with vibrant night life, Ford said. While resort locations are bought by "a consumer who wants a repeatable vacation," he said, "the urban center is bought by people from the outer suburbs that use the city as a cultural experience" and by corporations looking for a place to put up visiting executives.

Still, it's unclear how well these properties will do over the long term, particularly if the housing market cools off. Very few condo hotels are up and running, and it is not yet clear how well the hotel side of the operation will function. Also unclear is what will happen if the hotels fail to turn a profit. "What will the responsibility of the [condo] owners be if there are shortfalls?" asked Scott D. Berman, who runs the hospitality and leisure group for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "To be successful, it's got to perform as a hotel."