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Watch the Red Sox From Your Roof for 0,000: Are You Game?

There’s a new type of real estate for sale in Boston, and it doesn’t come cheap: a patch of roof on top of a 30-story tower where you can plant a lawn chair and admire the view. It can all be yours—for a mere $350,000.

Whaaa…??!! Certainly, you can buy a whole home, a nice one, for $350,000. So paying that for a 16-by-16-foot square of roof sounds ridiculous. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening over at the swanky Pierce Boston building being constructed on Boylston Street and Brooklyn Avenue, where developers Samuels & Associates are selling 12 “sky cabanas” to anyone who’s already bought an apartment in the building (which range in price from $1 million to $6 million).

These sky cabanas come with their own door and frosted windows for privacy, as well as lounge furniture, wet bar, and stunning views of Boston. You can even kinda watch baseball games unfold in Fenway Park (bring high-powered binoculars). So far, four have been snapped up, more than a year and a half before the building is even finished.

Luckily, condo owners in the Pierce Boston building who don’t want to cough up that extra cash will still have access to other parts of the roof, including an outdoor pool and sitting area. So, we don’t feel too bad for them. But clearly, for people with money to burn, sky cabanas are a hot new amenity that’s hard to top, literally!

“It’s a little funny to think of your own private little piece of cement up there,” Rich Giordano, a community organizer with the Fenway Community Development Corp., told the Boston Globe.

And Boston is not the only city where rooftops have evolved into prime real estate. In my own co-op apartment in New York, the roof has been carved up into private parcels where certain homeowners pay for the privilege to lay down decks and lawn chairs to bask in the sun.

And in certain cases where rooftop access is being barred, homeowners are rebelling: In a recent edition of the New York Times’ Ask Real Estate column, a homeowner complained that her co-op board had decided to block roof access except in emergencies. She feared that this would bring down the value of her apartment.

Because let’s face it—now that summer is in full swing, in cities where yards and even patios are scarce, the only place where urban dwellers can often go to get away from it all (and maybe even catch a baseball game) is up.

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Source: Real Estate News and Advice – realtor.com » Real Estate News