Luxury Real Estate

By Michael Edlund

“The view is out of this world.”

I overheard this comment at an open house during our recent Luxury Real Estate Spring Retreat in San Diego. We visited an amazing property on top of a hill with vast spectacular views over a beautiful landscape. Spectacular, but still of this world. No matter how crazy, ridiculous and out of touch with reality it seems today, there might actually be a day when we buy and sell property elsewhere in the solar system.

There were a few articles published recently that made me think of this. First of all, I read about Virgin Galactic currently building Spaceport America with the support of the state of New Mexico. It’s a huge-scale initiative by the Virgin Group’s eclectic founder Sir Richard Branson, aiming to bring commercial space travel to the general American public no later than 2012. It is now decided that Virgin will build Spaceport Sweden as the gateway for European space travelers.

It’s not a matter of if but when wealthy individuals can add space travel to their wish list of spectacular experience and adventure travel. And it seems to be happening sooner than many might imagine.

With space travel, I would say that there will inevitably be a whole new service ecosystem created around this new branch of the travel industry. I would guess that one of them will be accommodation. That brings attention to The Lunar Republic Society, which sells acre-sized lots on the moon through its shop Lunar Registry.

Buying land on the moon sounds like a joke to us. Nobody owns the moon. Well, the natives of America told the European settlers back in the day that it was a joke to them to claim that man can own land at all. Manhattan was sold for $24 because nobody could imagine that land had any tangible value.

Yes, I see the difficulty for this organization to claim the right to sell moon property. But being the “Earth’s leading lunar real estate agency,” the tens of thousands of individuals that have purchased lunar lots though them are backing them in their claim. Regardless of which organization that officially wins the right to sell moon property, they will be in a very good position to do so.

Just for laughs, I did buy an acre lot in The Sea of Tranquility a while back. I never thought, of course, that there would be even a remote possibility for me to see it in my lifetime. But hey, who knows? I’m wishing Sir Richard Branson all the best of luck with his ideas – ideas that are truly out of this world. Talk about opening up a new market...


Editor’s Note:
Michael Edlund is the Director of Technology with LuxuryRealEstate.com. He is in charge of all of LuxuryRealEstate.com’s Web projects, including Web site creation, software updates and implementation, and much more. Lunar luxury? That's loony. Pardon my pun. It’s funny because I recently watched “The Right Stuff,” the great 1983 movie about the original Mercury 7 astronauts who paved the way for the Apollo missions and other space exploration. It’s funny to look at their primitive ideas of space travel, but maybe in 50 years we’ll look back with similar feelings about our current steps reaching for the moon and other worlds. I think I’d prefer to buy some property on Europa or Io.