Today's Luxe Vacation Home: Less Palace, More Shack

Steve Schram has an unusual slogan for the new beachfront island getaways he’s building: “Affordable housing for the affluent.” Schram is selling pint-sized homes on Turks and Ciacos in the West Indies for as little as $1.4 million—or 44% less than the previous cheapest property on the island, the Wall Street Journal reports. “You can have a great place in a wonderful island,” he says, “for, quite frankly, a reasonable price.”

Schram’s not alone. The market for luxury getaways, usually sold as second or third or even fourth homes, is drying up. Florida’s Pine Creek Sporting Club used to sell homes for a minimum of $2 million; now, it’s offering cabins for $600,000. The lower-priced houses are purposely built smaller, so that the owners of bigger homes don’t feel cheated, and they seem to understand. “We’re at a different place than we were three or four years ago,” says one. (More vacation home stories.)