The form of ownership will change from that of a company with shares to freehold. Four-room apartments cost $600,000.
71 apartment owners in the Jerusalem Sheraton Plaza Hotel will soon obtain outright ownership of their homes, after a change in the ownership structure and registration of the apartments as an apartment building, including registration at the Land Registry Office. Among the owners who will benefit from the new arrangement are the heirs of Shoul Eisenberg, Ludwig Jesselson, and Yaakov Brin, who have apartments in the hotel. The building is considered one of Israel’s most prestigious addresses.
Previously, anyone buying an apartment in the hotel received a share in the Yehuda Hotels company, which owned the apartments. There are four such apartments on each floor of the hotel. The share granted the right to use an apartment, but not ownership in the usual sense. The apartments are not registered in the Land Registry under the names of the owners, who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy them.
Almost all the apartments have four rooms, and their value in the few deals done in recent years varied between $600,000 and $700,000. Deals were rare because the residents are not generally prepared to sell these apartments. The late Shoul Eisenberg was the only person to own a double apartment, the value of which is estimated at least $ 1.25 million. Another resident is Max Landau, one of the wealthiest Jews in Britain. About 60 of the owners have put their apartments into the hotel’s pool of guest suites, and enjoy a steady income from them.