I’m Out of the Office. Really.

In January, Claire Davis started buying bathing suits. In February, she prepped videos to send to clients in her absence. In April, the vacation finally arrived, and the day before her flight to Hawaii, she sat down to write her first out-of-office message since starting her own business six years ago.

“Girl, you’re looking so professional,” Ms. Davis, a Spokane, Wash.-based career consultant for medical-sales professionals, thought to herself as she crafted the note. As she pressed the button, “I felt free.”

The feeling lasted about an hour. While waiting in line for brunch with friends, frantic texts started pouring in. Somehow, she had inadvertently set her auto reply to spam message everyone who’d sent her an email since 2016.

Some—like the close contacts texting her—had been inundated with hundreds of out-of-office replies, one for every email they’d ever sent her.

“It was horrifying,” she says, estimating the messages reached tens of thousands of people.

You’re going on vacation. All that’s left to do is unlock the magic wording that will free you from your inbox—and by extension, your work life. So why is it so hard?

Fiddling with the settings is just the start. Do you make a joke, open up about your personal life? How do you get people to leave you alone without making them feel abandoned or annoyed? Are they judging the length of your absence? Maybe it’s not even worth trying to log off at all.

“You want this time off, but at the same time you feel so pressured and so guilty,” says Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, a professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal who studies how workers manage the boundary between work and life.

The agonizing isn’t our fault, she says. Modern workplaces expect people to be perpetually reachable, and the pandemic seems to have shortened expectations for message-response times. Working from home, out of sight, we should at least be a click away, the thinking goes. A survey from cloud-software company Qualtrics earlier this year found that 49% of respondents did at least an hour of work a day while on vacation.

The out-of-office email has the potential to be your shield, Dr. Ollier-Malaterre says. Don’t apologize for taking time off. Remove email notifications from your phone, or delete the whole app if you’re brave enough.

That said, if you do ruminate on work matters while on vacation, taking a peek at your inbox might be worth it, she adds.

“Sometimes you’ll feel better because you can see that nothing is burning,” says Dr. Ollier-Malaterre.

Brian Brown long went with the standard out-of-office-template, trying to imbue it with a quiet sense of “No, really, I’m actually not here.” It usually didn’t work.

When co-workers received his out-of-office email, “The next thing you get is a second message that’s, like, ‘Hey, but I really need this,’” says the 33-year-old, who works for a tax-software company in Lehi, Utah.

He bulked up his notes, enclosing details about his whereabouts (his hometown in Southern California, a Tim McGraw concert, camping with no cell service). He wove in facts about the destinations. He noted why the canyons he was traipsing through on a recent day off reminded him of tax compliance.

Rather than messages demanding work, colleagues and clients now chat with him about his travels. He feels more connected to them, and seen as a person, “not a 24/7 robot,” he says.

The away message can be a thrilling canvas for office workers with poetic souls. Aaron Konter, a one-time aspiring screenwriter, joined the advertising industry hoping to do the creative writing he had long dreamed of. Instead, clients wanted the work done their way. Supervisors slashed his copy.

Then the Atlanta-area resident discovered the freedom of the out-of-office email.

“I didn’t have to get it approved by anyone,” he says. “I could just be myself.”

Subject line of one recent note: “Aaron is OOO (Baby Baby),” referring to Smokey Robinson’s and the Miracles’ 1960s hit. In others, he riffed on how addicted we all are to technology and implored the recipient to create a vision board to try to manifest what they’re seeking from him. He signs off with “Love, Aaron.”

“This is me,” he says of his away messages. “And if you don’t like it, that’s OK.”

Some out-of-office messages hit a nerve. I heard from an entrepreneur who was outraged by an automated reply from a vendor saying he was surfing the coast of France. Meanwhile, the entrepreneur and his team were rushing to wrap a behind-schedule project that required the vendor’s help.

To avoid having your message land poorly, use language that assumes you don’t know the recipient well and that they have more power than you, says Erica Dhawan, a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based leadership consultant and author of a book about digital communication.

Keep your note to two or three sentences, because being brief signals you respect people’s time, she says. Include an emergency contact and when you’ll be back. But feel free to hedge, publicly sharing a date that gives you some buffer time upon returning.

If you still have trouble turning on your vacation responder, help awaits. Iceland’s tourism-marketing office recently launched an online campaign starring three horses who clomp across a giant keyboard in western Iceland, majestic waterfalls flowing in the background. The gibberish their hooves type is available for anyone to use as an out-of-office reply.

Sigríður Dögg Guðmundsdóttir, the head of the marketing unit, assures me that the out-of-office templates available on the Visit Iceland website were truly generated by the horses, though humans proofread them to ensure no swear words in any language accidentally made it into messages.

The horse babble sends a message, she says, and that message is: “I’m on my vacation.”

Going all out, with an equine twist or not, just might do the trick. After all, Ms. Davis—the career consultant who spammed thousands of her contacts with the away-message misfire—came home from two weeks in Hawaii to just a couple dozen emails.

“They let me have that vacation,” she says. “Without really bothering me at all.”

MANALAPAN, FLA.— The Deal-Closer. That’s what real-estate agent Jack Elkins jokingly calls the Hinckley picnic boat he docks on the Intracoastal Waterway in the Florida community of Manalapan.

From the road, many of Manalapan’s mansions are shrouded by plantings and foliage, but they are clearly visible from the water, Elkins explained. A boat ride is often the best way to show properties to the wealthy buyers now flocking to the tiny town.

On a recent afternoon, Elkins cruised down the Intracoastal in the The Deal-Closer, passing mansion after mansion, most with their own docks. “When I was a little kid, almost all of this was jungle,” said Elkins, 46, who spent much of his childhood in the area. “There were foxes and parrots and all these wild animals.”

Manalapan, a roughly 2.4-square-mile town with a population of about 400, is just south of glitzier Palm Beach.

While Manalapan has long drawn moneyed residents such as the singer Billy Joel, it has historically lacked the prestige—and price tags—of Palm Beach. That has changed dramatically over the past five years, however, thanks to a series of major home sales.

In 2022, for example, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison paid $173 million for a historic Manalapan estate. And David MacNeil, the founder of the automotive-accessories manufacturer WeatherTech, has spent a combined $94 million over the past year on a pair of neighboring sites, with plans to build a megamansion there.

“People like Larry Ellison and David MacNeil, these individuals can afford to buy real estate anywhere in the world,” said local real-estate agent Nick Malinosky of Douglas Elliman . “Manalapan is not a second choice for them. It’s their first choice.”

On South Ocean Boulevard, Manalapan’s most affluent corridor, about 21 homes have traded for more than $20 million each since 2020. At least six have sold for $40 million or more, up from only one in that price range during the previous five years.

In 2021, eBay billionaire Jeffrey Skoll bought an ocean-to-Intracoastal estate for $89.93 million, while Joel’s longtime home sold last year for $42.6 million.

Now, however, it is unclear whether Manalapan’s hot streak can continue. Like luxury markets across the country, the town is contending with stock-market turmoil and the fallout from President Trump’s tariffs.

Like many Manalapan residents, local developer Stewart Satter, who is listing a yet-to-be-built spec home for $285 million, is a Trump supporter. During the 2024 election, Satter flew a giant Trump flag above the site.

But tariffs have “created a tremendous amount of uncertainty at the minimum, and that is not good for business,” Satter said. “It’s not good for real estate. People say, ‘Let’s wait. We’re not going to buy a house, we’re not going to build a house.’”

Hitting the big time

Elkins’ cuddly Native American Indian Dog, Bear, lounged on The Deal-Closer’s blue-and-white-striped seats as the boat zipped along the Intracoastal, passing glassy modern mansions and traditional Mediterranean estates.

To catch a glimpse of Ellison’s roughly 16-acre oceanfront estate, Elkins guided the Hinckley through the Boynton Inlet into the choppy Atlantic, where the sandy beach in front of Ellison’s property was visible.

Known as Gemini, the gargantuan mansion was once owned by the late publishing magnate William B. Ziff Jr., who brought in large plantings and trees from South America for the landscaping.

“When I was a little kid, barges were going by our house with these huge trees,” Elkins recalled.

Ellison has approved plans to add more homes to the estate. He also paid about $277 million last year for Manalapan’s Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa, home to the members-only La Coquille Club, and talk is rife about how Ellison might upgrade the property. Ellison didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It’s a strange feeling, Elkins said, to see Manalapan hit the big time.

Before Covid, the town was often confused with its namesake: Manalapan, N.J. Tiny compared with Palm Beach, Manalapan developed much more slowly than its famous neighbour. It lacks the commercial infrastructure of Palm Beach, and its low-density zoning has kept it largely free of major condos or resorts.

When Satter, the developer, bought four empty lots in Manalapan in 2005, parts of the town looked like “just a mess of woods,” said his wife, Susan Satter. “I said, ‘Is this really how we want to invest our money?’”

Over the next decade, her husband built spec homes on three of the lots and sold them for a significant profit. He kept one, building a mansion there for himself and his wife.

“I thought I’d discovered a really special place,” said Stewart, who tested products for Walmart before turning to spec-home development. “If I had known what was going to happen, obviously, in the rear view mirror, I would have bought the whole town.”

The buyers of Satter’s projects include Ron and Cindy McMackin, who paid roughly $39 million in 2020 for a roughly 15,500-square-foot waterfront house with six bedrooms, then expanded it.

The couple, founders of the mechanical subcontracting company Pan-Pacific Mechanical, had relocated from Hawaii to South Florida during COVID.

“We knew nothing about Manalapan when we moved here,” said Ron, 78. He and Cindy were in the process of moving into a Palm Beach property they owned when their real-estate agent, Lawrence Moens , called. The actor Sylvester Stallone was searching for a home amid the Covid-induced real-estate frenzy, and wanted to see their house.

Before they knew it, they had agreed to sell to the “Rocky” star for $35.375 million, 33% more than the $26.65 million they had paid two years earlier.

This left them without a house. It was slim pickings in Palm Beach, and with five children, they needed plenty of space. Moens suggested Manalapan. At the time, the less-flashy choice was surprising to some of their Palm Beach friends. “I did hear a couple of times from people after that, ‘Why would Lawrence take the McMackins to Manalapan?’” said Ron.

But the McMackins love that it is quieter than Palm Beach, with less traffic. The couple have Sunday dinners with their neighbours, and Cindy has a small group of girlfriends who call themselves the “Manalapan mafia.” The McMackins like it so much that they are building a new, larger home along the same stretch.

Food-service entrepreneur Bob Carlucci and his wife, Aileen Carlucci, paid $11.63 million in 2020 for a roughly 13,000-square-foot Manalapan mansion on the Intracoastal, with a small beach house on the ocean. They are happy to have “discovered Manalapan early, ” Bob said.

Many buyers are tearing down older homes to build new mansions, Malinosky said. Before COVID, Manalapan was seen as more of a vacation destination, so buyers weren’t as choosy. Now that many are seeking full-time homes, however, “they want to make sure that it has the spa, it’s got the 12-car garage, it’s got the fitness centre, it’s got the wellness centre.”

Another prized amenity is a tunnel that runs underneath Highway A1A. Portions of the town are on a barrier island, and some homes sit on the ocean, requiring residents to cross the busy road to reach their docks on the Intracoastal.

Other estates are on the Intracoastal but have small beachhouses on the ocean. A tunnel allows residents to easily go from one side to the other.

Construction of these tunnels has become a rare point of contention between residents. In January, one couple asked the town commission to stop their neighbors from digging under the highway during the tourist season, claiming it was causing traffic to back up.

Building on the coast comes with challenges. Florida building code now requires roofs, windows and doors in high-risk areas to withstand winds of up to 170 miles an hour, according to builder Robert Burrage, who is building MacNeil’s home and four others in Manalapan.

Satter said the property insurance on his personal residence in Manalapan doesn’t include coverage for hurricane damage because it was too expensive. In addition to the annual premium, which was about $150,000 a year, he would have faced a deductible on hurricane damage of about 10% of the assessed value of the house.

He isn’t concerned with rising sea-levels, however. “When I bought my first oceanfront lot, my late father-in-law said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Don’t you know about global warming?’” Satter said. “I sold it at a huge number [in 2016] and made a lot of money. It’s been sold again and again and again—and the water hasn’t done anything.”

Stock market slide

Manalapan’s proximity to Mar-a-Lago has added to its popularity since Trump’s election to a second term, Malinosky said. Many residents support Trump. In the McMackins’ home, a bedazzled MAGA purse hangs in Cindy’s closet and a photo book in the living room shows her attending a Trump event at Mar-a-Lago, where they are members.

But the trade war and stock-market volatility have injected uncertainty into the real-estate market.

Until recently, Hamptons home builder Joe Farrell was considering paying more than $30 million for a building site in Manalapan, he said. He has decided to hold off on any acquisitions for now, however, because of the tariffs and resulting stock-market fallout.

“The market seems to still be pretty good, but people are maybe a little more cautious about parting ways with liquidity,” Farrell said. “I want to see things stabilize before I commit to that kind of capital outlay.”

Elkins said one of his clients considered backing out of a $10 million deal over the last few weeks on Point Manalapan, but decided to move ahead to avoid forfeiting the deposit.

Malinosky said he still sees significant demand for big-ticket properties in Manalapan, especially since many wealthy people are taking money out of the stock market. He said he has closed more than $150 million in deals in the greater Palm Beach area over the past two weeks.

Even with the uncertainty, “there is no shortage of buyers that will spend $100 million right now in Manalapan,” he said.

Shelly Newman, an agent with the Corcoran Group, said she recently sold a piece of land to a spec-home developer for $25 million. And the McMackins are moving ahead with plans to complete their new house, though tariffs have been “the talk of the town,” Ron said.

“I do have a stock portfolio and it is down,” he said. “But I don’t let that affect what I’m doing. We’re very fortunate with resources.”

While Satter agrees with efforts to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., he said he has been blindsided by the extent of the trade war. “I’m not sure about how they’re rolling it out,” he said.

A handful of potential buyers have expressed interest in his $285 million listing, he said, but he realizes the prospective buyer pool is tiny. “There are going to be three or four people who ultimately show real interest and have the capacity to pull the trigger,” he said.

Ultimately, he said he isn’t too worried about the prospects for sale, since he can afford to sit on the property long-term.

Still, real-estate agents said Satter’s property and others may be priced too aggressively, even without tariffs.

British hedge-fund billionaire Chris Rokos is listing his 3-acre Manalapan estate for $150 million, more than triple what he paid for it in 2017. And real-estate investor Vivian Dimond recently cut the price of a Manalapan home by $14.5 million, to $64.5 million. It’s been on the market since September 2024.

For some Manalapan residents, home values are beside the point. Bob and Aileen Carlucci, for example, have no intention of moving.

“We look at each other and we say. ‘This is it,’” Bob said. “You can’t get anything better, we don’t believe—in this country, at least.”

I’m Out of the Office. Really.

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Hitting the big time

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