Max Abelson
Articles by Max Abelson
Brooke Astor's $46 M. Apartment (Briefly) Off The Market
In what must surely be the most sweepingly devastating tragedy of the week (in terms of Park Avenue real estate), the late Brooke Astor's salivated-over $46 million duplex at 778 Park Avenue has been taken off the market for the summer.
The listing is down from the Web site of Leighton Candler, the Corcoran broker who won the listing after five of the city’s top brokerages met in the co-op's library, where the floor-to-ceiling bookcases have 10 coats of scarlet lacquer.
"We’re doing just a few things to the apartment during the summer work period," said Mr. Candler. "We’re making a few minor alterations to the apartment--we’re raising a ceiling that had been lowered in the entrance hall, because, you know, it needed to be done. read more »
One Penthouse Duplex to Rule Them All: Peter Jackson Likely Buyer of $17.3 M. Tribeca Spread
Peter Jackson, that jumble-haired, once obese New Zealander, whose massively fantastic Lord of the Rings trilogy makes the Star Wars franchise look like a feeble little video project by comparison, is not a name that simply pops up on a real estate deed in city records. (A Queens man named Peter A. Jackson and Peter G. Jackson of Brooklyn both make purchases in their own names, though that’s different.)
So considering that the filmmaker’s executive assistant Matthew Dravitzki, his New Zealand-based attorney Michael Stephens and his Hollywood power lawyer Peter Nelson are all listed in city records on twin penthouse purchases in Tribeca, it seems likely that Mr. read more »
Rangers' Drury Buys 'Operation Old School' Target's Central Park Condo for $5.1 M.
It took 18 months for Abraham Pustilnik to renovate his three-bedroom, Canadian-maple-floored apartment in the Century, that twin-towered 1930s Art Deco condominium on Central Park West, which is exactly how long a two-borough undercover investigation dubbed “Operation Old School” lasted before Mr. Pustilnik, his mother, his wife and 12 others were indicted for insurance fraud and grand larceny.
He and his mom, who led an enterprise of illegal New York health clinics and a billing company that filed a decade’s worth of bogus claims with over 60 insurance companies, had to pay $4 million after pleading guilty to corruption charges. But they’ll be all right: That Central Park West apartment has sold for $5. read more »
Wild Wildenstein Mansion Sells for $42.5 M.; Brooke Astor's Butler on the Deed!
Eleven years after the Dada-faced Jocelyn Wildenstein, who looks like a William Steig drawing of that great plastic surgery scene in Brazil, found her husband, Alec, in bed with a 19-year-old blonde at their 29-foot-wide mansion—Mr. Wildenstein, in a towel, responded by pulling a 9mm pistol on his wife—the famous townhouse has been sold.
The deal, first reported on The Observer’s Web site on Monday, closed earlier this month for $42.5 million.
In 1999, Ms. Wildenstein left the mansion at 11 East 64th Street, which was owned by her father-in-law, Daniel, and which she and her husband had shared with Alec’s younger brother Guy. read more »
$35 M. Park Avenue Mansion Goes to Contract After 19-Year Sales Odyssey
In June 1989, the month that the Ayatollah Khomeini died, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos were removed from the Corcoran Gallery and protestors were massacred in Tiananmen Square, the developer Sherman Cohen paid a then epic $12.5 million for the neo-federal, Tuscan-columned, 100-foot-wide, 20-foot-deep, 25-room mansion at 603 Park Avenue as a surprise for his wife.
She didn’t like it.
So Mr. Cohen put the house back on the market, where it stayed, on and off, for nearly 20 years. Around May 21, the press-shy broker and socialite Serena Boardman (her great-great-grandfather was George F. Baker, who founded what later became Citibank) and her Sotheby’s colleague Leila Stone put the house back on the market after a lull for $35 million. read more »
Infamous Wildenstein Mansion Sells for $42.5 M., But Is Buyer Blavatnik?
All unhappy houses are not alike. The epically altered Jocelyne Wildenstein lived for years with husband Alec on the third floor of his father's 29-foot-wide mansion at 11 East 64th Street, while his younger brother was one floor up, and both brothers' children (and a nanny) were up top.
Eventually, Mr. Wildenstein allegedly threatened his wife at gunpoint after she found him in that third-floor bedroom with another woman, and a judge barred him from the house. Ms. Wildenstein left herself in the spring of 1999--leaving the basement swimming pool, ballroom, and 18th-century satinwood French furniture. Mr. Wildenstein died earlier this year.
Now his family is gone from the house, too: According to a deed filed today in city records, the house sold this month for $42. read more »
Will New 'Beaver Butler' and Pillow Fights Sell Balazs' Condos?
When times get tough, what does a perfectly-coifed developer--once called the King of America--do to sell the dozens of remaining apartments at his new condo? Lure buyers with videos of pillow-fighting chicks.
André Balazs today introduced a new amenity at his Beaver House condo in the Financial District building, and it’s called The Beaver Butler. For about $1,000 per year, buyers can watch footage from their “in-residence cameras” on their computers--to “check up on what’s happening while you’re away.”
According to the faux camera footage on the condo's Web site, you’ll apparently see shirtless men with power tools drinking beer in the kitchen, a girl dusting down a yellow convertible, or, in the bedroom, two blondes and a brunette dressed in pink smacking each other with pillows. read more »
Kaiser Roll
New York since 1968. In 1978, he
co-brokered the first Manhattan apartment
deal over $1 million.
“For the past 15 generations, nobody in my family has had to work,” said A. Laurance “Larry” Kaiser IV, the high-end Upper East Side real estate broker. “You work because you have to contribute to society.”
Mr. Kaiser, 66, was sitting upright in his small Madison Avenue office last month. A day earlier, two top executives at Lehman Brothers had lost their jobs and the Federal Reserve released a grim economic report: Manhattan real estate is “down sharply … inventories of unsold units have risen.”
Has Mr. Kaiser, a broker since 1968, been anxious? “Not in the past 40 years,” he said. read more »
Handbag Designer, 22, Nets $8.1 M.Village Townhouse
Greenwich Village has a very young new landlord.
Earlier this year, a 22-year-old handbag designer and freelance fashion writer named Charmaine Ho bought a 25-foot-wide Greek Revival townhouse on West Ninth Street. According to city records, a limited liability corporation in her name paid $8.1 million.
Her parents, who still live in the Hong Kong house where she was born and raised, are paying for almost all of the townhouse. “I can contribute as much as I can, but it’s not enough, and they’ll have to help me,” said Ms. Ho, reached through a school e-mail address. “I don’t even have a full-time salary! I work part-time for a small designer, and then I also write things for Web sites. read more »
De Montebello Sells East Side Co-op for $2.1 M., But Stays in Met's Neighborhood
The fact that imperial Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello is ending his 31-year tenure in just a few months is bad enough for the Upper East Side’s delicate collective psyche. But what would happen to the neighborhood’s sense of nobility if the molasses-voiced descendent of Napoleonic aristocracy (and, on his mother’s side, of the Marquis de Sade) actually moved away?
According to city records, Mr. de Montebello and his wife, Edith, director of financial aid at the Trinity School, sold their two-bedroom co-op at 25 East 86th Street this month for $2.195 million.
The buyer is graphic designer Holly Okner, whose father happens to be the investor Peter A. read more »
Rag & Bone Founder, Makeup Artisan Buy Chelsea Duplex for $4.42 M.
It’s been about seven years since David Neville founded Rag & Bone with a friend from English boarding school, but their pristine $480 split back swing dresses, $215 western shirts, $505 hooded capes and matching $215 tailored leggings are the kinds of things that get designers very far very quickly in this town.
Mr. Neville and his wife, the star makeup artist Gucci Westman, just bought a duplex penthouse loft at the Spears Building, a former warehouse on West 22nd Street. According to city records, they paid $4.426 million.
“We’re so excited to get in there,” Mr. Neville said. “My wife, she’s definitely pretty good with interiors and color; that’s what she does. read more »
Are Eight Bedrooms Enough to Break a Record? 1030 Fifth Duplex Listed for $47.5 M.
This May, it took Christine Wasserstein less than a week to find a buyer for her $34 million apartment (which she’d kept after a divorce from New York magazine owner Bruce Wasserstein). Her neighbors at 1030 Fifth Avenue—where, for example, Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols live in Robert Redford’s old penthouse—were probably impressed.
Barnard trustee Karen Fleiss, who founded the hedge fund KMF Partners, and her husband, David, a Fifth Avenue orthopedic surgeon, have put their duplex there on the market for $47.5 million, one of the most expensive apartment listings ever in New York.
“I’m not going to respond to that,” said Ms. read more »
Lady Selling $47.5 M. Co-op: 'What Difference Does It Make To Me? None! Zero!'
In tomorrow's Manhattan Transfers, I write about a seven-bedroom duplex (actually, a "gym/bedroom" makes it eight) that went on the market this month at 1030 Fifth Avenue for $47.5 million, one of the biggest apartment listings ever in New York.
(See Vespa-driving broker Sharon Baum's listing for good floor plans, or certified Lamaze instructor Fritzi Kallop's listing for the good interior shots.)
The sellers are an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. David Fleiss, and his wife, Karen, a Barnard trustee who founded the hedge fund KMF Partners. (If you're into this sort of thing, you may also remember Ms. Fleiss from an apartment deal with Brown Bunny director Vincent Gallo. read more »
Most Expensive New York Apartment Ever ('Quietly') Listed: $150 M. at 15 CPW
Remember that rumored $90 million listing at 15 Central Park West? It was nothing.
Dolly Lenz, New York City's most gargantuan real estate agent, broke astounding news at Portfolio's Four Seasons get-together this morning: "There are a few apartments on the market at 15 CPW, a new development on Central Park West, asking somewhere between $80 and $125 million--three different apartments--and one quietly on the market at $150 million," she said.
Wowzah. Brokers have already made it known that two condos in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed blockbuster building are being offered at $80 and $90 million, so Ms. Lenz's quote not only means that there's a third apartment on the market in the building for somewhere between $80 and $125 million, but that there's a fourth spread whose owner wants $150 million. read more »
Trump on $100 M. Sale: ‘You Don’t Have to Worry About Me’ Plus! Spurned Broker Lenz on ‘Voice’ in Donald’s Head
In the next few weeks, when the Russian fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev buys Donald Trump’s gargantuan Palm Beach estate Maison de L’Amitie for a reported $100 million, it will be the biggest sale ever of a single-family home in America.
“You don’t have to worry about me at all,” Mr. Trump told The Observer, when asked about the country’s real estate woes. “We’re doing well.”
Besides the bizarreness of a record-breaking sale during a mostly cruel year for real estate, there’s the astounding fact that the listing broker, Lawrence Moens—Mr. Trump calls him Larry—had only been showing the property since March. read more »
One of Manhattan's Biggest Townhouse Sales! Home of Late Goebbels Kin Goes for $37.5 M.
While the rest of the country wallows in a gruesome housing slump (“He could only nod, tears welling up, when asked if it was hard to make new friends,” The Times wrote this week about a boy, in actual tattered socks, who’s had to move with his mother from rental to rental in Flint, Mich.), the tip-top of New York City’s high-end real estate keeps booming.
Rich realty gets richer and strange people—bespectacled hedge-fund evil geniuses, oil barons and, yes, sometimes the descendants of major Nazis—benefit.
According to city records, the 11,626-square-foot, six-story mansion at 18 East 80th Street sold this month for $37. read more »
Soho Loft Seeks 'Some TLC' as Deposed Shoe Shiners Sell for $7.3 M.
The over-chic luxury loft building at 285 Lafayette Street—where 31 apartment units were built above a former chocolate factory, then sold to David Bowie and Iman, Patrick McEnroe, an IBM heiress, a Murdoch heir—is supposed to be a shiny, happy place.
Larry and Annette Everston, the owners of the high-end shoe shop Otto Tootsi Plohound, outdid their neighbors in shininess: The Observer reported in 2000 that while Mr. McEnroe hadn’t planned renovations for his place, the Everston couple had spent close to $3 million to transform their $3.5 million sixth-floor loft “into a northern Morocco village, complete with mosaic tiles, a citrus garden of lemon and orange trees in the sunroom, Venetian plaster walls, cement countertops built to look 200 years old, even a waterfall in one corner. read more »
Ashley Dupre's 'Uncle Jim' Buying East 75th Triplex Penthouse
If the economy plunges further, if the recession becomes a depression, if there’s blood on the streets and panic in the air, short sellers, the investors who make money by betting that stocks will fall, will be seen as an evil coterie of cackling villains that profited from downturns they may have encouraged.
More than John Paulson (who made $3.7 billion last year by betting against subprime mortgages) or David Einhorn (who may be helping Lehman Brothers go the way of Bear Stearns), James S. Chanos, the president and founder of a hedge-fund group called Kynikos (from “cynic” in Greek), may be the best short seller of them all. read more »
From Madonna to Moet! Club-Turned-Condo To Throw Party
Last month, The Observer wrote about 30 West 21st Street, the building famous for its old new-wave dance club Danceteria (Madonna debuted there). The place sold last year for $25 million to an investor who's turning the place into 11 4,000-square-foot apartments (listed around $5.8 to $7.9 million each), plus a triplex penthouse ($7.7 million), plus a townhouse apartment ($9.25 million).
“Legitimacy is the one word I can really give to it,” the investor, named Kevin Comer, said then, but by legitimacy he meant details like three-inch solid marble kitchen countertops, lifestyle designers, in-loft wine cellars and gyms, radiant-heat floors and daily maid service with chocolates on pillows. read more »
Where's the Fizz? Bronfman Selling 1040 Fifth Co-op for Below Asking
The colossal Manhattan real estate story of Edgar Bronfman Jr., Seagram liquor grandson and Warner Music Group CEO, has finally taken a comparatively imperfect turn. Eight months after he sold his East 64th Street townhouse to a Russian oil billionaire for $50 million, even though he paid $4,375,000 for the property in 1994, his 11-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue has gone to contract for somewhere between $20 and $21 million, a source said, well below the original $24 million asking price.
Meanwhile, the duplex penthouse he bought at the Carhart Mansion on East 95th Street last October for around $19 million, and put on the market in April for $24. read more »
Brokers Bicker! Much Ado Over $35 M. Upper East Side Manse
The 13,137-square-foot limestone mansion at 9 East 67th Street will never again have dramatics as grand as that episode a few years ago, when a convicted sex offender living in California quibbled with his siblings over the family property. After a judge stepped in, the comely, slightly-mysterious, Russian real estate investor Janna Bullock (pictured) finally bought the house in April 2005 for $10 million.
By that November, it was on again for $29 million.
High-end Upper East Side brokers, the kind with pristine Palm Beach tans and Aspen ski-slope condos, can’t match the bickering of felonious heirs, but they have their own kind of drama. read more »
Songstress Regina Spektor Gets Elevator: Buys $1.1 M. Murray Hill Pad
Regina Spektor, the massively charming, epically quirky, Russia-born, Bronx-raised, East Village-bred singer-songwriter, who has two particular Joni Mitchell-caliber songs, “Carbon Monoxide” and “Somedays,” that can make this reporter cry, just bought an exceptionally nonquirky apartment in a huge white-brick postwar building at East 34th Street and Third Avenue.
According to city records she paid $1,125,000.
Speaking from his 50-foot boat, listing broker Donald Kohlreiter, who also has an apartment in the building, said: “She’s just exuberant. She just loves the apartment, she loves the views”—you can see the Chrysler Building from the condo, plus the East River—“and she likes the building. read more »
My Sister, My Buyer: Siblings Trade Village Apartment, Again, for $1.44 M.
Significant sociologists, even the ones famous for studies on the inequalities between siblings, sometimes have complicated relationships with their little sisters.
New York University sociology chair Dalton Conley (pictured) sold his sister Alexandra, the former executive director of the Soho Repertory Theater, a two-unit apartment at 323 West 11th Street for $1.44 million this month, according to city records. “I definitely have a lot more money than she does, and that’s why she gets the hand-me-downs,” Mr. Conley said. “I’m older, I’m in a more established industry; she was working for a small black-box theater.”
What about childhood? “I was more of the good kid. read more »
Julia Allison On New Real Estate Show: 'Like, Social Calendar Like Mad'
Star editor-at-large and dating columnist Julia Allison, whom The Observer has called a Manhattan amalgamation of Paris Hilton and Ayn Rand, is a guest on that new CW11 Sunday morning real estate show, NY Residential.
In this sure-to-be-a-classic-of-real-estate-television clip, she and mortgage broker Jeff Appel chat at a Park Avenue restaurant for a segment called Sunday Brunch ("Where each week I sit down and talk with notable New Yorkers and real estate experts," Mr. Appel says.) The Observer got a DVD with the columnist's interview, in which she is introduced thusly: "With her fingers always on the pulse, Julia Alison lives a celebrity life in New York." Mr. Appel also says: "With her shiatsu never far from her side..." read more »
15CPW Alert! Philadelphia Flyers/76ers Owner (and Ayn Rand Lover) Ed Snider Buys $7 M. Condo
In what surely must be yet another brutal blow to the self esteem of Philadelphia, that cute Pennsylvania city that pretends to rival New York, its biggest sports mogul, Ed Snider, has paid $7,340,000 for a high-floor apartment at Robert A.M. Stern's 15 Central Park West.
The deal has been a long time coming. According to a deed filed in city records this morning, Mr. Snider signed his contract back in December 2005, and didn't close until April. read more »
Rent-Stabilized No Longer! Nora Ephron Buys $2.5 M. Co-Op Near Beloved Apthorp
Writer and director Nora Ephron, the guru of American romantic comedies and once the most famous super-wealthy rent-regulated tenant in New York City (in 2006, she wonderfully admitted to "bribing her way into an eight-room apartment for $1,500 a month"), will probably be paying twice that amount in monthly co-op maintenance fees from now on.
According to a deed filed today in city records, Ms. Ephron and her husband, Nicholas Pileggi (he wrote Casino and Goodfellas, she wrote Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally), have paid $2.475 million for an apartment in the Georgian-style co-op building at 136 East 79th Street. It’s on the same block as the Apthorp, where the couple lived for decades (she filmed part of Heartburn there), but on the snobbier side of Central Park. read more »
Heidi Klum Sells $5.35 M. Penthouse to Guy Who Makes Nail Polish Rock Art
Bank Street is a funny place. A man who makes mixed-media rock 'n' roll art, combining old pictures of Mick or Neil or Bob with "nail polish and pieces of burlap combined with gold leaf paint," just bought an expensive 166 Bank Street penthouse from a woman who hosts Germany's Next Topmodel and Project Runway and gets paid a lot to wear pink underwear.
According to a deed filed today in city records, Steve Joester and his wife, Debra, spent $5.35 million for Heidi Klum's penthouse, which, unfortunately for the supermodel, is a quarter million dollars less than the price The Daily News reported a week ago. read more »
Ambulance Chasers Catch Bribed Broker’s Condo for $2.7 M.; N.Y.U. Law School Plans Faculty Pad
It’s hard to call something ironic in this town: There’s always an English grad student nearby to point out that Alanis Morissette’s understanding of the word is simply erroneous; even Wikipedia’s 3,339-word (not counting bibliography) entry for irony has a “usage controversy” section to expound on potential linguistic misinterpretations.
But consider this: Paul Risoli, the former Bank of America broker caught in a massive Wall Street insider trading ring, and sentenced to seven months in prison this February for taking $12,500 in bribes, just sold his apartment to New York University’s School of Law. read more »
River House Vacancy! Yet Another Spread Up for Sale, This One Asking $29 M.
Too many unsold apartments, especially massive apartments with servants’ halls and bedrooms with fireplaces, are a terrible thing for a famously pricey, scarily selective building like River House, probably the best co-op building off Fifth and Park avenues. The supply of River House spreads is supposed to be chicly low; demand is supposed to be desperately high. read more »
Spotless Park Avenue Mansion Edges Toward 20 Years on the Market, Still $35 M.
If the 25-room, stupendously wide red-brick mansion at 603 Park Avenue stays on the market past December, which, considering its melodramatic history, is in the realm of possibility, it will be 20 years since the office-tower developer Sherman Cohen bought the neo-Federal corner townhouse.
And he’s never moved in, or spent a night. read more »
The story goes that Mr. Cohen bought the 100-foot-wide, 20-foot-deep mansion as a surprise for his wife, Gloria, spending a then-gargantuan sum of $12.5 million. But she was unhappy: “I think my mother’s reluctance was that she really likes a doorman building and she likes the services a co-op provides, and my father was respectful of that,” son
Brokeback Majestic! Movie Producer Sells CPW Spread for $7.5 M. to Goldman Prophet
Like the 1998 BusinessWeek cover story that christened her “THE PROPHET OF WALL STREET,” profiles of Goldman Sachs’ famously bullish senior strategist Abby Joseph Cohen merrily point out that she’s spent her whole life in the same middle-class Queens neighborhood.
But last month she finally arrived in Manhattan, buying a co-op from a billionaire’s son: Ms. read more »
The Glass Tycoon
48-year-old developer Aby Rosen talks Tom Wolfe,
Chrysler Building could-have-beens, fear and caring
deep down about money.
Location: You like to give parties with dozens of Russian violinists and industrial quantities of caviar. Is decadence your worst trait?
Mr. Rosen: The last thing I am is decadent. … I’m a big thinker; I do a lot of stuff; I enjoy life immensely. … When I throw parties, I blow a lot of money, you know what, so be it; that’s what I like to do.
That sounds like Trump. Do you think of yourself as a high-art Donald? read more »
Why Is This $17.9 M. Penthouse On the Market? President Obama, for One Thing
A duplex apartment that stretches across two Tribeca buildings, 39 and 41 North Moore Street, just hit the market for $17.9 million. The listing broker, Helen Dreyfuss, says there's about 3,973 square feet of interior space (that's 11 rooms, four bedrooms, two wood-burning fireplaces, an office, a media room, and windowed double kitchen), plus 2,321 square feet of epic terraces ("seamless integration from predinner cocktails to dinner to after-dinner drinks and cigars in a finely articulated sequence of individual spaces.")
The sellers are Joy and Leonard Toboroff, the 74-year-old vice chairman of a Houston-based oil/gas-drilling outfit named Allis-Chalmers Energy. They got the place a few years ago from Tom Freston, the felled MTV and Viacom chief.
Reached through his broker, Mr. Toboroff had this to say when asked why he'd put the place on the market: "We have two kids that are out on their own now--my daughter got married last summer; we’re out of the country about 100 days of the year anyway." Then he paused. "I don’t know! No real reason. But I think an economic reason can be made that Obama can be elected and he’s pledged to raise capital gains." read more »
Very Nice, Bolat! Brother of Kazakhstan Dictator Buys Epic Plaza Spread
Family ties to Nursultan A. Nazarbayev (pictured), the only president in Kazakhstan’s 17-year post-U.S.S.R. history, are not necessarily enough to guarantee permanent affluence. The state charged his daughter’s ex-husband with kidnapping—simply retribution, the ex-son-in-law has said, for his own presidential ambitions.
But it’s definitely good to be the president’s brother. According to a February deed filed in city records just this week, Bolat Nazarbayev and his wife have paid around $20 million for a corner unit facing Central Park at the Plaza. read more »
Giant Pianist Lang Lang Gets $1.8 M. Duplex Near Carnegie Hall
Chinese megastar Lang Lang, the hugely ebullient, swooned-over classical pianist, has a new duplex across the street from Carnegie Hall, according to city records. read more »
Simon Hammerstein Bites Into Seaport Box for $1.2 M.
The 30-year-old, English-accented, big-bearded Lower East Side nightlife king Simon Hammerstein, who calls his half-burlesque, semi-lewd supper club the Box a “theater of varieties,” just bought his first apartment, according to city records.
Last month, he paid $1.27 million read more »
Heir Comes Closer to Emptying Rent-Stabilized Building; Plans East Village Mansion with Two Living Rooms, Garage
The East Village is a big step closer to getting a brand-new mansion and losing a 15-unit, 60-room, 11,600-square-foot rent-stabilized tenement building. read more »
Did Real Estate's Wonkiest Web Site Inspire New Josh Hartnett/David Bowie Film?
Besides the thrill of watching David Bowie lean forward all Bond-villian-like and say, "We don't much like the way you conduct your business," the trailer for the new Josh Hartnett film August will thrill New York real estate wonks that use the research Web site PropertyShark.
Mr. Hartnett plays Tom Sterling, a luxury car-driving, babe-bedding start-up mogul behind an Internet start-up called LandShark. It's not clear what kind of Web site it is ("What do you actually do?" says Rip Torn, "Why the hell would somebody give you a million dollars?"), but the names are pretty absurdly similar.
PropertyShark founder Matthew Haines responded thusly: "I watched the trailer and found no similarities with PropertyShark," so apparently there won't be any thrilling lawsuits. read more »
Is That Much-Hyped $90 M. (or $100 M.) Listing at 15 CPW For Real?
Even if the prospect of a $100 million apartment sale in Manhattan isn't wildly far-fetched, there are some good reasons to be skeptical about all the news lately on venture capitalist's Lindsay Rosenwald's 15 Central Park West spread.
On Sunday, The Times wrote that Dr. Rosenwald's 5,870-square-foot duplex in the condo, which he bought for $30 million in April, has gotten "five or six calls from brokers, offering as much as $100 million for his apartment." But the source for that information is the owner himself, and the only other tidbit to back up his numbers is a story exchanged between brokers in which Dr. Rosenwald "was said to have been offered $85 million." We don't hear who those brokers are.
On the one hand, anything is possible—remember the Bronfman brothers' extraordinary flips last year—but, still, Dr. Rosenwald comes across as a man who wants to stir up excitement (and a lot of money) for his apartment. Even though he said he was happy in the building, consider that his only direct quote in the piece is, "The only thing in my life that is not for sale is my wife and my kids.”
So it makes sense that there’s news this morning that a Brown Harris Stevens broker, Janet Gifford, just sent out a memo saying that the place is coming on the market: “As of now, we are asking $90 million.” read more »
Did Auntie Mame Fanatic Scarlett Johansson Buy $2.1 M. Penthouse, With Greenhouse?
When this column broke the news late last month that the famously mouthed 23-year-old Scarlett Johansson had sold her duplex loft at 66 Leonard Street for $1,898,000, a $52,000 loss from what she’d paid in January 2006, some relatively heartfelt concern was expressed for the starlet’s New York real estate choices.
After all, it’s genuinely impossible to remember a plump apartment that didn’t hugely appreciate over the past few years. read more »
Doyenne Kook Betsey Johnson Splits Village for $1.85 M. Upper East Side Condo
Glee and kookiness left Greenwich Village sometime during the Giuliani administration, when all the frat bankers and handbag-carried Yorkies moved in.
Still, it’s massively odd that the designer Betsey Johnson, the fluorescent-colored, polka-dotted cat lady of New York fashion, a 65-year-old that makes 1983-era Cyndi Lauper look gray-scale by comparison, has abandoned the Village for the Upper East Side. read more »
Christine Wasserstein Finds Buyer for $34 M. Co-op in Under a Week
The huge S&P/Case-Shiller Index just showed that American home prices dove down in the first quarter of 2008 at the scariest rate in two decades. And yet, ignoring the warning from index co-founder Robert Shiller that Manhattan is “not immune, I can guarantee you that,” the most expensive co-ops in New York continue to levitate, rising higher and higher above the nationwide calamity. read more »
Four Years, Four Months Later, Billionaire Flowers Scores Legal Victory on East Side Townhouse Work
Even in the absurd little world of Upper East Side real estate, there are few fights as magnificent as the feud between billionaire financier J. Christopher Flowers and the developer Dominion Management over the townhouse at 12 East 73rd Street. And unless there’s a drastic Act V turn, Mr. read more »
Justice Department Steps Up For Those Poor Online Brokers!
The Observer tends to profile brokers that not only have offices, but work with fountain pens on antique oak desks (which is why Edward Lee Cave’s grandfatherly firm is pictured above).
But today there was a huge victory for Internet-based agents--and don't sneer at that phrase, because "more consumers use the Web when house hunting than rely on 'For Sale' yard signs." In a settlement today, the Justice Department said that the National Association of Realtors could no longer restrict Web-focused, discount brokers from the group's database of real estate on the market, known as an MLS.
Luckily for the realtor group, they don't have to pay a fine, or even admit wrongdoing. read more »
The View's Joy Behar Buys Co-Op for $2.5 M., Not $3.5 M.; Plans Thorough Renovations, Maybe a Piano, New Toilet
In early April, the New York Post’s weekly real estate column ran an item on View co-host Joy Behar that said she’d bought a new apartment at Broadway and West 89th Street “for approximately $3.5 million,” and was selling her old co-op in the building.
But according to a deed filed this month in city records, Ms. Behar actually paid $2,555,000 for the place, and she hasn’t sold her old apartment. read more »