Andy Plesser, a New York public relations executive, had spent years vacationing in the Caribbean with his wife, Kathy, a radiologist, and their two children, Ben, now a college sophomore, and Becky, a high school senior. But it wasn't until they visited the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which was once home to a U.S. Navy firing range, that they got the buying bug.
"We'd even been to Anguilla five times," Kathy Plesser said, "but we were on Vieques for three days before we decided we should just buy here."
Until May 2003, the navy controlled two-thirds of the island, which measures 52 square miles, or 135 square kilometers, leaving its 10,000 residents in the middle. The navy land now is a wildlife refuge, while development has swept the rest of the 21-mile-long island.
"The key to this was — this was our fantasy, how can we make it a reality," Andy Plesser said.
Their first plan was to build a house.
"We signed an agreement and even signed a check for the deposit, but the seller couldn't sell," he said. Inheritance disputes, complicated by a civil code from the colonial past, derailed the sale.
"We came down two weeks later, to find a spectacular house with a spectacular view," Plesser said. "We made another bid, wrote another check and signed another contract and the seller just did not want to sell,"
Booming prices had convinced the seller that he should hang on to the land a bit longer. But the third time the Plessers signed, the deal went through for a two-story, 2,000-square-foot, or 185-square-meter, concrete and stucco home with a view southeast to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Plessers would not disclose the price; but a comparable property — two to three bedrooms with a nice view on a quarter-acre to one acre, or one-tenth to four-tenths of a hectare — sells for $350,000 to $400,000
Although the island is at least a four-hour air trip from New York, the Plessers say buying a vacation house so far from home has not been as fraught with problems as they feared.
"The key," Andy Plesser said, "is networking and establishing a network of good will and trust."