Word: condos
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Under a sullen sky, Donna Blair, 54, dabbed tears and watched her $6.8 million vacation condo slip into the sea. Not that she was upset. "It's amazing," she said, a glass of champagne in her hand. "It's different from any of the other homes we own, that's for sure!" Donna and husband Jim, 56, had come from San Jose, Calif., to Landskrona, Sweden, to watch The World of ResidenSea, the world's first luxury condominium cruise ship, sail for Norway, where it would be painted and outfitted with a shipbuilder's equivalent of a Barguzin sable coat...
...Blairs are among 75 owners and 12 prospective buyers lined up for condos priced from $2 million to $6.8 million. In the bigger picture, though, they are part of a well-heeled, spending-friendly stratum of society that marketers circle like cats at a sushi bar, proffering exclusive riding clubs in the West or 400-year-old farmhouses in Italy. The minimum net worth for the World's condo buyers is $5 million, an elite group that marketers call "penta-millionaires." The niche might seem rarefied, but data issued in February by the Spectrem Group estimate that...
This being real life, however, there is also a bill: annual condo fees are about 6% of the purchase price, which works out to more than $400,000 a year for top-priced units...
...creator of the World is Knut Kloster Jr., a cruise-industry veteran whose father founded what is now Norwegian Cruise Line. Kloster originally planned a ship with 286 condos and 183 hotel rooms. After scaling back, he was able to attract investors, including the Continental Casualty Co., a subsidiary of Chicago-based insurance giant CNA Financial Corp. But to persuade penta-millionaires to buy, ResidenSea assembled a cadre of credible associates, including its blue-chip investor Silversea Cruises, which will manage maritime and hotel operations. ResidenSea also marketed through sophisticated make-believe. Inside a factory near Vienna, the company built...
...clothes to and fro was a pain. And Esther began to long for more privacy. So when the couple decided to shift from separation to divorce after 19 months, Esther bought a condominium. She and Perry continue to share custody, but now the children must commute between her condo and their old home, where Perry is living until he can find a smaller place. Elisheva finds the constant shuttle a nuisance. "I have two boxes with CDs, books, makeup and clothes that I take back and forth," she complains. "I have five phone numbers--my line and a house line...