**OT, but something IOM shareholders might think about for next winter **
So buy yourself an island
By James M. Clash
FROM 2,000 feet up in our noisy Helicopter
Seychelles whirlybird, the island below looks
small and compact, a commingling of whites,
greens and gray-blacks. As we descend, the
whites become pristine beach sand, the greens
become the leaves of palm and coconut trees, and
the gray-blacks become sharp granite cliffs and
rounded boulders. When we finally touch down,
one of the boulders begins to move.
"That's Charlie," shouts Farhad Vladi, 51, who is
showing us around the 593-acre North Island in
the remote Seychelles. "He doesn't like the
helicopter noise." Charlie is a giant turtle. "Buy this
island, and I will throw him in with the deal,"
laughs Vladi.
Farhad Vladi is the broker you see for real estate
that ordinary folks can't get to: He is the world's
foremost island peddler. In the past 25 years he's
sold more than 600 of them. For Vladi the
inaccessibility of his parcels is a major plus.
The island business is booming. With offices in
Europe and North America, sales for Vladi
Private Islands should top $25 million this year, a
record. Vladi charges about 8% commission, part
of which supports his staff of 18 in Hamburg and
Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Peter Ruester, a German construction magnate,
owns North Island and has commissioned Vladi
to sell it for $5 million. "His second wife doesn't
approve of the island because she considers it the
love nest of the first," explains Vladi.
Vladi has a special affinity for the Seychelles. As a
young Ph.D. student in economics at the
University of Hamburg in 1971, he visited the
chain-located in the Indian Ocean between
Kenya and India-on a lark and saw one island,
80-acre Cousine, for sale. Vladi toured Cousine,
taking photos.
Back in his hometown of Hamburg the
entrepreneurial half-Iranian, half-German found a
local businessman interested in Cousine. The price
was $100,000. The client bought the island solely
on the basis of Vladi's pictures and paid him a 5%
commission.
Thus began Vladi's island-brokering career. Since
then he's sold from Fiji to Cap Ferrat. His clients
include Virgin Atlantic's Richard Branson and
actor Tony Curtis (and, incidentally, Forbes Inc.,
publishers of this magazine). He is currently
hawking singer Diana Ross' place in the South
Pacific-25-acre Tiano. Price: $3.5 million,
including electricity and water piped in from the
French Polynesian main islands.
Vladi's current inventory lists 120 islands. For the
bargain hunter, there's puny Piscataque, a kind of
starter island just off the coast of Nova Scotia, for
$220,000. For those on a little richer budget,
there's Isola Santo Stefano, a 66-acre rock off
Naples. The $10 million price tag here buys you
your own 18th-century amphitheater and public
boat service to and from Naples.
For real swells, there's $20 million Daros, a
1,100-acre coral atoll group 80 miles from Mahe,
capital island of the Seychelles, complete with
airstrip. Daros is as private as it gets. The current
owner, Iran's once-royal Pahlavi family, sees no
other land from any of these 12 private islands.
On a quick inspection of our Forbes Four
Hundred list over lunch at the Coral Strand Hotel
on Mahe, Vladi found seven people who had
bought islands from him but would not identify
them. "These people buy from me because they
want privacy," he says. "Do you think they want
me to tell you who they are?"
But Vladi is more forthcoming about island
owners of The Four Hundred to whom he hasn't
sold. He cites the Bacardi family, which owns an
island near Grenada; the Disneys (Echo Island in
Washington's San Juan Islands); the du Ponts
(Cherry Island in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay);
the Barbara Piasecka Johnsons (Children's Key,
Bahamas); the Mellons (Canada's Georgian Bay);
the Robinsons (Hawaii's Niihau Island); Peggy
Rockefeller (Maine's Buckle Island); Ted Turner
(South Carolina's St. Phyllis Island).
Microsoft's Bill Gates is rumored to be island
hunting in the Bahamas. Vladi even has two
islands of his own: 25-acre Sleepy Cove in Nova
Scotia, which he rents out, and 2,000-acre
Forsyth Island in New Zealand. He's got a kind of
time-sharing deal with three partners on this one.
What caused the island business to boom?
Discounted airfares and vacation packages. It got
too easy to go to the old watering holes of the
rich, such as Tahiti or the south of France. To get
truly away now, you need a moat as big as, say,
the Indian Ocean. In short, you need your own
island.
Vladi estimates that the world has 3,000 or so
purchasable islands, with the supply growing. The
Philippines, for example, is particularly well
stocked, with 7,000-odd islands. Vladi figures
300 to 500 of them have private-paradise
potential when the Philippine government decides
to allow outside private ownership.
It's also a lot simpler to own an island today. New
technology-including desalination plants, solar-
and wind-powered generators, prefabricated
houses and wireless cell phones requiring no
ocean cables-has brought down the cost of
building and maintaining an island hideaway.
But are they good investments? If you have to
ask, you probably shouldn't own one. You can
always rent one, though. A lively island rental
market has cropped up, and it's getting livelier.
Virgin Atlantic's Richard Branson has developed
his purchase of Necker in (appropriately enough)
the British Virgin Islands. He charges $7,500 to
$11,000 a day, depending on the season. His
occupancy rate: a very good 75%. Vladi now has
listings for 65 rentals, ranging from just $9.99 a
night for his "survival kit" island experience (a
Swiss army knife on an uninhabited island)
to$10,000 a night on the pampered high end.
Whether you buy or rent, Vladi claims there's
something about the romance of an island that can
make the most world-weary tycoon
weep-literally. Peter Hutley, an unsmiling English
financier, sold Fregate Island in the Seychelles to
German industrialist Otto Happel in the late
Seventies. When it came time for Hutley to depart
his domain for the last time, he commanded his
private pilot to loop back and dip the wings while
he wistfully threw a single rose from the window.
"He had tears in his eyes, a man I could never
imagine with tears," recalls Vladi. "This you would
never do if you sell your condominium in Florida."
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