When hotels are not the only option

Office manager Janice de Jesus is one ‘bakasyonista’ who likes the feel of home when she is traveling. She prefers to stay in a rental close to a wet market so she can buy her favorite vegetables and cook for her family.

For her, staying in a hotel is not always the best option. If she can find a rental that allows her the amenities of home, she’d prefer that over a stuffy hotel whose sliding doors you can’t even open.

“Usually when people plan a vacation, they assume that a hotel is the only option available to them,” she said.

An increasing number of people are turning to property rental as an alternative. Whether in the city or deep in the countryside, there are some great opportunities available to people that want to spend a little while in a house or apartment instead of a hotel.

Property rental has over the past few years become more and more popular, as people seek to engage more with the community they’re staying in. In Janice’s travels — for work or family recreation – she’s found holiday homes with their own kitchen. She opted for that during her recent visit to London weeks before the Olympics.

“We were able to visit the local markets for ingredients, which gave us a chance to mingle with the locals and find out more about their food culture,” she said. “It’s also obviously a money-saver, when you can cook your own meals instead of having to find a restaurant three times a day.”

Apartments and houses also offer more space than hotel rooms. In a hotel, you’ll normally find a bed, a table, and a chair, but a fully furnished apartment is often the same price as a hotel, and gives you much more of a sense of freedom, when you have a living area separate to the bedroom.

Obviously, there are some differences. You can’t call room service at 4 in the morning and ask them to make you a sandwich, rather, you have to make it yourself. But the independence is also part of the appeal. You can find many rental properties at this site.

For people able to work from home, a vacation in a rented property can still be productive. Many properties offer Internet access, and a holiday home in the country can be a fantastic way to work and relax at the same time.

In Janice’s recent trip to the U.K., that meant spending half a day working at the computer, and having the other half of the day to cycle through the hills, or go swimming in a nearby lake.

source: thefilam.net

Another Pricey Rental Rises on the Upper West Side

TWO years ago, the opening of the Corner and the Aire proved there was a healthy appetite for spare-few-expenses rentals on the Upper West Side.

Units in these buildings, which have finishes like mahogany floors and amenities like washers and dryers, leased quickly, even though rents were higher than the neighborhood average.

Now a new project is trying to replicate their successes. Developed by Friedland Properties and Rose Associates, a 20-story rental building is going up at Broadway and 77th Street. The building is now known as the Larstrand, though developers say that is just a working title.

What is settled is that the high-rise will have 181 units, from 480-square-foot studios to 1,700-square-foot three-bedrooms, said Robert A. Scaglion, a senior managing director of Rose Associates.

The $135 million project, which kicked off last summer, is not expected to be complete until the end of 2013, but developers have already chosen many finishes. Kitchens will have quartz counters, Bosch appliances and Bertazzoni ovens. Bathrooms will have Italian tile walls and floors, Kohler tubs, and under-floor radiant heat. Bath mirrors will be defoggable with the flick of a switch; a portion of mirror surface will have a television built in.

Rents for the three-bedrooms, which will be on the corners with views of Broadway, are expected to be $90 a square foot, Mr. Scaglion said, and one-bedrooms, which will average 700 square feet, could cost around $80 a square foot. That comes out to around $13,000 and $4,750 per month, respectively. (Twenty percent of the units will be offered below market rents for qualifying tenants.)

The average rent in May for a one-bedroom on the Upper West Side was $3,471 a month, or about $60 a square foot, according to MNS, a real estate brokerage.

To help justify these prices, and to compete with other buildings, the Larstrand developers are putting extra effort into the common areas. The 4,800-square-foot roof deck, for instance, will have an outdoor movie theater, which is something the Corner did not offer, Mr. Scaglion said. The theater could be the scene of movie-night parties, he added.

“The evolution of the high-end luxury building is that residents are now requiring special programming in these kinds of spaces,” said Mr. Scaglion, who also marketed and leased the Aire, at 200 West 67th Street. in addition, Rose handled the marketing for the Corner, at 200 West 72nd Street.

The L-shaped Larstrand site takes up the entire eastern side of Broadway between 77th and 78th Streets (the residential address is 227 West 77th Street). It will have 40,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor, as well as two lower levels. Also on the site are two other buildings, which will be preserved and renovated. So far, CVS has leased a 9,800-square-foot store, a company spokesman said. The two-story buildings that used to line the block were home to a diner, a pizza place and a taekwondo school, as well as the popular Asian restaurant Ruby Foo’s, which closed its location there in 2009.

For Friedland, which did not respond to a request for an interview, No. 227 continues a recent push into residential development. The company, led by the brothers Lawrence and Melvin Friedland, owns more than 100 buildings on the East Coast, according to its Web site, including several in the area. But brokers said the firm had not built a major new one until the 22-story Melar went up at 250 West 93rd Street in 2007.

The Melar has 143 units, ranging in size from studios to three-bedrooms, though rents, at an average of $70 a square foot, are below what No. 227 plans to charge, Mr. Scaglion said, because the Melar is north of Broadway’s liveliest shopping district.

One factor working in the Larstrand’s favor is that it will come to market with little in the way of competition, since many development plans were deferred during the recession, said Andrew Barrocas, the chief executive of MNS. With limited inventory and strong demand, vacancy rates have fallen into the low single digits, so rental projects that open in the next two years are in a great position, he said. “I was blown away by what the rents ended up being for the Corner,” Mr. Barrocas said, “and I expect this building to do just as well.”

source: nytimes.com