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luxury real estate

A Slow Slide from ‘Ridiculous’: West 67th Condo Chopped Mightily to $8.97 M.

Everything that comes up must come down, even the price tags for apartments with telephone-programmed air-conditioning, six-head steam showers, motorized refrigerator shelves, heated towel bars, master suite sitting rooms and 1,100-square-foot entertaining terraces.

Earlier this month, the asking price of a four-bedroom apartment at 45 West 67th Street fell to $8,975,000, two years after it was Read More

Awesome and Disappointing: The Meaning of Big Deals at 838 Fifth, Chupi and Beyond

The software magnate Marty Sprinzen’s $24.5 million, 4,552-square-foot, seven-room apartment at 838 Fifth Avenue, the kind of place where there’s museum-quality lighting, Venetian plaster and heated Portuguese limestone floors in the entrance gallery alone, went to contract last month, according to its Brown Harris Stevens listing.

By itself, that news wouldn’t mean much. After all, signed Read More

$42.5 M. Wildenstein Lair Quietly Asks $37 M.

When the 29-foot-wide mansion at 11 East 64th Street was sold off last July for $42.5 million, it was one of the biggest and strangest sales of 2008. And it’s getting odder: According to two sources, the buyer is quietly willing to part with the house for only $37 million.

The mansion’s broker, both sources said, Read More

Tough Field

Location: What was your childhood like?Ms. Field: Very Middle America; perfect; ideal; Donna Reed … My mother wore the apron; president of  the PTA; had a baking day, had a shopping day; Ashtabula, Ohio.

You were a Pan Am flight attendant in the late ’70s, when you married. Where did you meet your husband?Four twenty-nine East Read More

The Princess and the Pincuses

On Nov. 3, 2003, Lionel Pincus was standing in a tuxedo in the New York Public Library’s Astor Hall. It was the Library Lions gala, and everything was lovely. The venture capitalist’s longtime companion, Princess Firyal of Jordan, was there, and so were Lord Conrad Black, Veronica Hearst and Henry Louis Gates. Trumpets called guests Read More

Great Vu, $25 M.

What does luxury in Brooklyn look like? That doesn’t seem to matter so much as what it looks at.

The borough’s most expensive apartment, the triplex penthouse of David Walentas’ ClockTower building at 1 Main Street in Dumbo, had its coming-out party Thursday night, to the awe and approval of New York’s real estate elite. Read More

The Goldilocks Listings: When $28 M. Post-Lehman Seems Just Right

Even though luxury real estate brokers are all horribly optimistic by nature, this summer there was a lot of stoic head-nodding about Manhattan’s fall from absurd exuberance back to reality. They called it the adjustment.

“Everybody likes to make money,” the broker A. Larry Kaiser IV sighed last month, “but you become realistic.”

So the big annual Read More

Equity God Neidich Buys Downtown

Whereas everyone accepts that Soho isn’t really a neighborhood anymore, just a well-groomed mall for cologned tourists, Nolita is still wavering between scruffiness and snobbery. Mustachioed hipsters haven’t fully taken over the neighborhood, though neither have balding financiers.

But this summer, the first apartments have closed at 211 Elizabeth Street, which would be an obnoxious new Read More

Porn’s ‘Invisible Man’ Prices His Condos at $13.5 M.

Real estate stories starring pornography publishers don’t always end well: Penthouse founder Bob Guccione lost his East 67th Street mansion in 2006; Al Goldstein, former publisher of Screw, went from a Pompano Beach mansion (featuring an 11-foot raised middle finger) to sleeping in a car parked behind a Boston Market; even Hugh Hefner sold off Read More

Jacky Teplitzky, Nobody’s No. 2

Location: As of today, you have nearly 10 listings under $1 million, but none over $10 million.

Ms. Teplitzky: When we realized the market was going, we basically made a switch. The market started to be active in the under–$1 million range. … What we Read More