These days, I can’t even afford to rent a trailer on Shelter Island
As a young man living in New York, I used to club together with four or five friends every summer and rent a house on Shelter Island. About 80 miles from New York, it is close enough to the Hamptons to enjoy a certain social cachet, but not so close that it is overrun with Porsche-driving investment bankers. A favourite bumper sticker on the island reads: ‘SLOW DOWN — You’re Not Off-Island Any More.’
I spent an idyllic summer there in 1999 with the woman who would become my wife and we have often dreamt about returning one day with our children. This year, I decided to bite the bullet and began looking into the cost of renting somewhere for two weeks. Judging from how much I used to pay in the late 1990s, I was hoping to secure a three-bedroom house for around $5,000.
‘You’re joking, right?’ said my ex-flatmate Euan Rellie, a New York-based financial consultant who now owns a house in the Hamptons. ‘Multiply that by four and you might find some barn in the middle of the woods.’
What I had not bargained for was the collapse of the Hamptons real estate market in the wake of the credit crunch. Since the implosion of Bear Stearns in March of this year, few properties in the region have changed hands. According to the local estate agents, the only people looking to buy are bottom-feeders hoping to take advantage of mortgage-defaulters. ‘The worst was one who said, “I know it’s a distressed market — show me somebody who’s bleeding”,’ says a Hamptons real estate broker.
Another broker tells of a Wall Street guy who demanded to see 200 properties in the area and then made offers of 50 cents on the dollar on two or three of them. ‘This isn’t an isolated case,’ the broker says. ‘We call them the undertakers.’ Instead of buying, people have been renting — and the upshot is that rents this year are higher than ever. Sting set a record in 1996 when he rented a mansion in East Hampton for $100,000, but that now seems laughably cheap. ‘You can get a nice house in Bridgehampton with a tennis court for $250,000,’ says Susan Breitenbach, a real estate broker at Corcoran. However, that’s north of Highway 27, the main road that divides the fashionable side of the Hamptons from the unfashionable side. ‘To get the same house south of the highway you need to spend $350,000 to $400,000,’ says Breitenback.
According to one glossy magazine, a young Wall Street banker paid $395,000 to rent a waterfront mansion in Sag Harbor — $250,000 more than anyone has paid in Sag Harbor before. This year the record has been set in Sagaponack, where a builder-broker named Andrew Saunders rented his newly built McMansion for $700,000. Prices on Shelter Island are not quite as high as they are on the South Fork — the locals’ name for the cluster of resort towns that make up the Hamptons — but they are still astronomical compared to what they were 10 years ago. For instance, I inquired about renting a crumbling waterfront pile that three friends and I rented in 1996 and was informed that the cost of taking it for two weeks would be the same as the cost of renting it for the whole summer back then. So much for my fantasy of recreating the famous Austin Powers party we held at the same house 12 years ago.
One alternative that Euan suggested I look into was renting a caravan on Montauk beach at the easternmost point of the South Fork. Unfortunately that, too, proved out of my league. I quickly discovered that ‘trailers’ are only available to rent for the whole of the summer and the average price is $35,000.
In the end, I settled for exactly what Euan had predicted — a barn in the middle of the woods. The upside is that it is only 100 yards from Goat Hill, one of the island’s two golf clubs. The downside is that it is owned by a New York-based artist who makes elaborate, hi-tech gizmos. ‘Please be careful with that,’ he said, pointing to a dining-room table equipped with eight portable cameras designed to record supper parties. ‘It’s worth $80,000.’ My four children eyed it with glee, itching to get their fingers on the vast array of buttons on the control panel. I fear I may lose my deposit.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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