08:19
The section of the magazine was called Real Escapes and in 2005 I was in charge of it, despite having never owned any real estate in my life. This meant that all the renovated castles in Scotland, subdivisions of modernist prefabs and Tuscan villa communities that crossed my desk looked pretty seductive.
I would paraphrase press releases at a length of 1,500 words, and the magazine – a bimonthly lifestyle supplement to a major national business publication – would run enticing photography or renderings supplied from the developers.
Was this journalism? Not even close.
What it was was junkets galore. I traveled to places where wealthy businessmen might want a vacation house, often on a developer’s dime, sometimes on a modest allowance from the magazine. This was 2005 and 2006, the tail end of an exuberant time. Loans were cheap and money was everywhere: a kind of ubiquity of wealth that didn’t yet seem foolish, sinister or unreal. Or it didn’t to me.
It does now. Ten years later, amid warning signs of another housing bubble, I can see that the hints were everywhere: deserted developments, half-built luxury condo towers, empty construction sites. There was the private island off the coast of Antigua where the developer showed me new house after new house, all apparently sold to wealthy buyers. Five million, ten million, twelve, he said. Not one of them looked as if they’d been ever been inhabited.
Read Full Story: My life inside the luxury real estate bubble
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