As with private jets and Hamptons houses, yachts are luxury items that New Yorkers are beginning to choose to own in part rather than in whole.

Entrepreneur Donald Choi last month launched a yacht share program from East Hampton and Chelsea Piers. Members pay between $995 and $2,995 a month for unlimited access to the company’s seven-yacht fleet, which includes a 42-foot Italian Azimut that cruises to the Hamptons from Manhattan in four hours. Members also pay up to $4,000 each time they take out a boat for a sail. For high-maintenance luxury goods such as yachts and jets, where daily costs are significant and opportunities to sail and fly can be scarce, partial ownership can be more appealing than exclusive control. The popularity of companies such as NetJets and SailTime, which sell fractional ownership in aircraft and yachts across the country, is sparking smaller local copycat business models such as LL Yacht Club, which is targeting the Hamptonsbound market.

Even though its members don’t own their own vessels, LL Yacht Club is branding itself as the most elite yacht club in town, competing for the title with New York Yacht Club, where two current members must recommend each new associate.

LL Yacht Club members must be high-level executives and business leaders who earn at least $500,000 a year, Mr. Choi said. “I wanted to create a real club with these executive-level people doing business with each other,” Mr. Choi, a former chief financial officer for the Diane von Furstenberg Studio, said. “Six guys can take out a boat and do business. You have a captive audience for two or three hours.” So far, 19 members have signed up, and Mr. Choi is looking to boost membership to 70 sailors by next summer and add larger yachts to his fleet.

“The vast majority of our members could afford to buy their own yachts, but don’t have the time to use them,” Mathias Chouraki, the owner of SailTime, another yacht share company that operates out of Chelsea Piers, said.

Some boat enthusiasts said yacht shares such as LL Yacht Club could attract a new element to the city’s waterfront: wealthy New Yorkers with little natural interest in or knowledge of the art of yachting. “I’d think that would attract the ‘snotty yachtie’ type — a lot of guys in blue blazers, popped collars, and captains hats,” the vice commodore of the New York Sailing Club, Chris Hulbert, said.

Experts warned that even fractional ownership isn’t responsibility-free. “With any of these fractional ownership programs, you need to be careful that the company is going to turn a profit, or your membership money will go to waste and end up tied up in bankruptcy court,” the chief executive officer of the research firm the Luxury Institute, Milton Pedraza, said. LL Yacht Club, whose launch was reported in this week’s edition of Crain’s New York Business, is not expected to turn a profit for at least two years, according to Mr. Choi, who has reportedly invested $2 million in the business.