What makes a place your own?

We are staying in a hotel room in Miami Beach. I'm thinking about why you would want to own a condo here full-time instead, especially if you could only use it a few weeks, or at most month, a year.

Let's discount the investment value, because, certainly in this area, there hasn't been much investment return recently. Quite the opposite.

An important part of what makes a place your own is you have your own possessions and things around you, your own books, music and other collections of things you amass over time.

We have a jam box in our room, and two ipads. That means we can play a large proportion of our entire music collection at will, in a completely different place. We have books on our kindles. We have full internet.

It blurs the boundaries of what is your own long-established space and what is borrowed space. You can take digital possessions anywhere.

Of course, if it was our own condo we would have art on the walls and plants and little sculptures, candles, cups, wine glasses.

We would have a fully equipped kitchen.

But having a large slice of our own books and music here makes any place seem more like home. We can rent beautiful surroundings - an ocean view, a balcony -- for a quick refresh. We don;t need it all the time.

We think more in terms of renting places for a week or a month in the future, through sites like homeaway.com, rather than buying a single vacation home. Any place can be ours for a few weeks.