Agent Detail

CurbedWire: Twenty9th Park Madison Settles a Debt  MURRAY HILL—You know times have changed when the developers of a new luxury condo tower send out a press release celebrating the fact that they've…... Read more >

CurbedWire:

Twenty9th Park Madison Settles a Debt
 MURRAY HILL—You know times have changed when the developers of a new luxury condo tower send out a press release celebrating the fact that they've paid off their $114 million construction loan. That's precisely what's happened at 34-story newcomer Twenty9th Park Madison, and we'll bite because they included some pictures of the building's new grillin' and loungin' enabled roof deck. We're suckers for a good sky-high getaway. [CurbedWire Inbox]
< Read less

The Hunt  Wall-to-Wall Skyline By JOYCE COHEN Published: July 24, 2009 FINDING a view wasn’t the problem for Pierre Brouwers and Sanja Zigic. There were a fair number of those, especially in the…... Read more >

The Hunt 
Wall-to-Wall Skyline
By JOYCE COHEN
Published: July 24, 2009

FINDING a view wasn’t the problem for Pierre Brouwers and Sanja Zigic. There were a fair number of those, especially in the many penthouse condominiums they visited.

But if the view was ideal, other details weren’t, like an apartment’s layout, its neighborhood, the nearby restaurants or lack thereof. “Always something wrong, always a couple of faults,” Ms. Zigic said. “You can tolerate one or two faults, but when it comes to three or four, you cannot.”

A New York pied-à-terre with a view was the greatest priority for Mr. Brouwers, 59, a Belgian-born documentary filmmaker whose French-language films are shown on French and Canadian television. Magali and Nicolas, his two grown children from his first marriage, live in Paris.

His fiancée, Ms. Zigic, 35, left her native Croatia as a teenager. After finishing college, she opened a real estate agency in London, where she is now a property developer and interior designer.

Ms. Zigic met Mr. Brouwers about a decade ago when he was looking for a flat in London. Although he did not rent from her, the two became friends and eventually began dating.

About four years ago, after seeing a newspaper ad placed by Ellen Simon, a broker at Bellmarc Realty, the couple enlisted her help in their hunt for an apartment, for $1 million to $1.5 million, to use for their many trips to New York. “I was dreaming of a great view onto the skyscrapers,” Mr. Brouwers said.

At that point, properties sold quickly, and the couple didn’t have time to devote to a serious apartment hunt.

They resumed last year, when prices were falling and the euro was strong. Ms. Simon showed them some places above their price range, “and I liked those apartments, so I decided to increase my budget,” Mr. Brouwers said. “I understood that to have something like that, I needed to spend more.”

Last summer, the couple came close to buying at the Chelsea Stratus on 24th Street and the Avenue of the Americas. They considered a few places there, including a 1,575-square-foot two-bedroom two-bathroom condo for around $2.8 million, and the three-bedroom three-bath penthouses, each with more than 2,250 square feet. The penthouses, for around $4.5 million, were at the very top of their budget.

The lobby, which Ms. Zigic said was dark, was easy to overlook because of the endless sunlight upstairs. But they weren’t sure that they liked the neighborhood.

There were numerous retail vacancies in the area’s many new buildings, and the available shopping consisted of mundane businesses like lighting stores, said Jeffrey Rowe, Ms. Simon’s partner at Bellmarc. A messy, crowded street fair during one visit didn’t help.

The couple were also serious about the glass-and-granite Park Imperial at West 56th Street and Broadway, part office building and part condominium.

A 1,400-square-foot two-bedroom two-bath apartment there, for around $2.9 million, had three exposures, including Central Park and the Hudson River. The view, though magnificent, wasn’t apparent immediately upon entry. It was necessary to walk down the hall first. The two walked away from that apartment.

Meanwhile, they decided they wanted a bigger place, where they could spend even more time. “New York is like a muse,” said Ms. Zigic. “The more often we were coming, the more New York was going under our skin.”

She wasn’t in town when Mr. Brouwers saw the view from 45 East 89th Street. The three-bedroom three-bath condo had 1,650 square feet of space and a balcony.

He bid $3.9 million, but when he spoke about it to her, “he was having this long face,” she said. She couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t more excited.

When she visited, she saw for herself. The balcony overlooked “this green extravaganza” of Central Park, she said. But inside the building, circa 1969, the fixtures were ornate and dated, “with lots of gold and glitzy things.”

The ceiling was so low that it almost seemed Mr. Brouwers, a tall man, would bump his head. Ms. Zigic told him to “buy this apartment only if you have a plan to spend most of your time on the balcony.” They withdrew the bid.

Few modern condos on the Upper East Side have views, Ms. Simon said, because they are blocked by equally tall neighboring buildings.

This time around, “properties remained on the market for a few months, so we had the time to look for something that would suit us perfectly,” Mr. Brouwers said.

The couple then arrived at Twenty9th Park Madison on East 29th Street. Each penthouse, not yet completed, had two bedrooms, an office, three bathrooms, 13-foot ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows and a private roof terrace.

For Ms. Zigic, it was “straightaway, love on the first sight.”

Mr. Brouwers hesitated. The neighborhood wasn’t what he had hoped for.

But “I can see opportunity, and the neighborhood is getting better and better,” Ms. Zigic said. “I like this poor cousin of a very good neighborhood. It has so much potential to grow,” as evidenced by the new Gansevoort Park Hotel rising opposite their building.

They chose the east-facing penthouse specifically because they preferred the view from its roof. So they weren’t happy when they were told the penthouses would have no private roof terraces after all. The space would instead be shared by the whole building.

With private roof space out of the equation, they realized the other penthouse had a better view, with more of the Chrysler Building showing. So they negotiated to swap their apartment for its neighbor, and bought that one last winter for $4.23 million. Monthly charges and taxes are slightly less than $3,000 a month.

From inside, they are thrilled to see the Chrysler Building and three other landmarks — the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Life Tower and the Flatiron Building. When the Empire State Building was illuminated in red, the color of much of their furniture, “I called my mom and said that even the Empire State Building is copying us,” Ms. Zigic said. (Actually, the lights were red, white and blue for the Independence Day weekend.)

“Nighttime is a permanent spectacle,” Ms. Zigic said. “It is always entertaining. Anywhere you go in the apartment, you see the skyline and something is moving, something is flying.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Brouwers, inspired by the many taxis the couple took during their apartment hunt, was working on a documentary of New York as seen through the eyes of taxi drivers. “Taxi Drivers” is to make its debut on French television in September.

Not surprisingly, the film is filled with panoramic views of the city. Though most were shot from helicopters, a few were shot from their building’s roof terrace.

< Read less

The tallest green condo shoots While troubled projects have dominated the headlines, there are a number of condos sprinkled across New York City's skyline that have actually seen boosts in sales of late.…... Read more >

The tallest green condo shoots

While troubled projects have dominated the headlines, there are a number of condos sprinkled across New York City's skyline that have actually seen boosts in sales of late. After what was by all accounts a dead winter, life seems to have returned to the market for some new condominium buildings this spring — even if the numbers are still relatively small.

For example, while the Harlem market has been getting a lot of ink lately for being in peril, its most prominent new project, the tribally inspired Kalahari, sold the most apartments citywide between March and May with 10 contracts signed.

This month, The Real Deal looked at the number of contracts signed and closed in newly constructed buildings in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and ranked the buildings with the most activity (see accompanying charts starting on page 58).

The data, which were provided by StreetEasy, showed that this past spring only 373 newly constructed apartments went into contract citywide, down 41 percent from last spring, when 632 new apartments went into contract. But the numbers are far better than they were during the stagnant winter.

"Although there is a decline in activity from a year ago, this is actually showing an improvement of activity compared to the previous season, where there was a 57 percent drop in contract activity from the year prior," said Sofia Kim, StreetEasy's vice president of research.

Many of the buildings that appeared on the best-seller list tended to share a number of traits, including hitting the key 70 percent sales threshold, generous incentives, negotiability in price, high-end finishes and spacious layouts.

They also tend to be in less-prime neighborhoods.

"Right now, we are seeing increased activity in areas that have had typically less cachet-neighborhoods such as East Harlem, Yorkville and Clinton," said Kim. "Areas that have seen the most dramatic declines in contract activity are Financial District, Chelsea, Flatiron, Midtown East, and Upper West Side … Very little activity is happening in areas like Soho, Central Park South, East Village and Murray Hill."

In Queens, Long Island City had a strong showing, with four of the top buildings in that borough.

Andrew Gerringer, managing director of the development marketing group at Prudential Douglas Elliman, which is marketing a number of projects on the list, including four of the five buildings on the Queens list, explained, "When 75 percent of the sales in the market are under $1 million, it's no surprise that people are flocking to an area where most of the product is under $1 million."

At one of the buildings, Arris Lofts, which is priced at $635 per square foot, a major selling point has been its easy access to the Court Square subway station, which is across the street and only one stop from Manhattan.

Of newly constructed apartments, Kim said 66 percent that went into contract during the spring are under $1 million, compared to 63 percent of newly constructed apartments being priced under $1 million.

Unlike in The Real Deal's examination last month in "Spooked by Ghost Towers" of the buildings that were selling the worst in the city, the top-selling buildings are, in many cases, nearly full.

While the number of contracts signed in many of the buildings is admittedly small because of the slow market, it does illustrate which projects are doing best and provides the best real-time gauge of activity in the market during the three-month stretch examined through the end of May.

The data is supplemented by a more abbreviated list of projects with the most closed sales in each borough, a more lagging indicator.

The contract data was, however, dependent on brokers voluntarily updating the status of their listings. In some cases, developers and brokers claimed the number of apartments that went into contract during the spring was greater than the figures reported by StreetEasy. Corcoran Sunshine and the Developers Group said, for example, that in many of their firms' buildings, signed contracts aren't reported until the units actually close.

And Scott Avram, senior project manager at Toll Brothers City Living, said Northside Piers in Williamsburg sold 29 apartments this spring, which would make it the top seller in the city. But only projects that updated their listings on StreetEasy were counted because the database appears to offer the most comprehensive information on otherwise elusive contract information.

Playing the lottery

Half the buildings that made the lists have closed sales of at least 70 percent of their apartments, critical in a marketplace where many lenders won't issue mortgages to new construction that hasn't met that sales threshold.

Some of the other buildings have made big strides in getting closer to that marker over the last few months. According to Joe Ferrara, a principal at BFC Partners, the developer of the Toren in Downtown Brooklyn, the building has 49 percent of its contracts signed.

Both the Kalahari in Central Harlem and the Toren had a head start because a percentage of their apartments were immediately sold through housing lotteries. Kalahari sold half its units in a housing lottery to middle-income buyers, while Toren sold 40 of its 240 units in a lottery.

"To fill 250 units with 100 percent market-rate buyers in an emerging market, that would have been a daunting task," said Kalahari developer Carlton Brown, CEO of Full Spectrum NY. "It in some ways mitigates everybody's risk when you've got 5,000 to 6,000 people on a waiting list for half your inventory."

While it may seem counterintuitive to have the embattled FiDi project 20 Pine: The Collection listed as Manhattan's third best-seller during the spring, given how troubled the project has been, (see story on page 50) the building has finally reached the 70 percent threshold after three and a half years of selling and offering deep discounts (one studio was marked down 44 percent).

Still, the rooftop deck was buzzing on a recent Saturday afternoon with residents sunbathing and drinking cocktails under the shared cabanas. Marc Palermo, regional sales director for Shvo, the brokerage marketing 20 Pine, denied rumors reported on the popular real estate Web site Curbed.com that the developer was considering selling 80 units at half off as part of a bulk sale deal.

Many of the buildings on the list are either offering promotions or negotiating generous discounts, according to brokers' own admissions and the listings history available on StreetEasy of some contracts signed in the spring that have closed.

The data show that 500 Fourth Avenue in Park Slope ranked No. 1 in Brooklyn for most units in contract with only seven contracts signed. The building has not only been promoting the "white-glove experience" it offers on the otherwise dressed-down Fourth Avenue, but is also trying to boost sales with its "early bird special." Buyers who ink a deal at the building by July 31 get an instant 10 percent off. After they move in, an around-the-clock concierge and doorman service is easily accessible via a video intercom system that includes a special call button for a car service.

According to a building spokesman, more than 80 people show up at every open house.

 

< Read less

The Real Deal With CBHK gone, Warburg takes over marketing of Twenty9th Park Madison June 11, 2009 12:45PM By Candace Taylor   Warburg Marketing Group has replaced the now-defunct Coldwell…... Read more >

The Real Deal
With CBHK gone, Warburg takes over marketing of Twenty9th Park Madison

June 11, 2009 12:45PM
By Candace Taylor

 

Warburg Marketing Group has replaced the now-defunct Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy as the exclusive marketing and sales agent at Twenty9th Park Madison, Warburg said.

Richard Steinberg, an executive managing director at Warburg, is overseeing sales at the 142-unit condominium, according to Andres Hogg, U.S. general manager of Espais Promocions Immobiliáries, the building's developer.

The on-site brokers, formerly CBHK agents, will now be employed by Warburg and Steinberg will lead the team.

"We made a decision to keep the sales staff we had in-house, but to bring in a person like Richard to manage the people who are doing our sales," Hogg said.

Twenty9th Park Madison is located at 39 East 29th Street between Park and Madison avenues. Roughly 100 of its 142 units have gone into contract since sales started in September of 2007, according to Hogg.

In the final weeks of CBHK's existence, the bulk of agents there were encouraged to move to the Corcoran Group, and to take their listings with them. Others were slated to go to Sotheby's International Realty.

NRT, the parent company of Corcoran, Sotheby's and international real estate company Coldwell Banker, is a subsidiary of New Jersey-based Realogy, which also operates independently owned Coldwell Banker franchises like the late CBHK.

Hogg said he received word a month ago that CBHK would close, and was told that some agents would go to Corcoran and others to Sotheby's, but "we never had any formal proposal from them," he said. Corcoran declined to comment on Warburg's takeover of sales at the building.

Since then, Hogg said, Espais had time to "discuss some ideas with other firms."

The developer chose Warburg, in part, because it's "not one of the huge companies," he said, and may be able to focus more attention on the project than would a larger firm.

"I can have good face-to-face interaction with the people who make the decisions in the company," he said.

Steve Goldschmidt, a senior vice president at Warburg Marketing Group, agreed. "We have a very intimate management format," he said. "There's going to be a lot of attention paid to the property."

He added that the transition is a little unusual because the development changed sales teams because of CBHK's demise, not because of poor sales.

"As opposed to Barack Obama, this is not about change," Goldschmidt said. 

Because the project, designed by H. Thomas O’Hara Architects, is already selling well, Warburg isn't planning a major overhaul of the building's marketing strategy, he said.

"We wanted to assure the developer that we're not coming in like bulls in a china shop to disrupt an already successful project," he said.

The remaining units range in price from $600,000 for studios to $4 million for higher-floor units, he said. 

According to Streeteasy.com, the average sale price-per-square foot for units in the building is $1,396. Some units in the building have sold for discounts of up to 28.9 percent off their original asking prices.

"We understand that things are not what they were last year," Hogg said. "We are working around it."

< Read less

Photog Colbert’s Elephantine Pied-à-Terre, Tea Bags Included, Asking $20 M. by Max Abelson  |  6:36 PM February 17, 2009 This article was published in the February 23, 2009, edition of The…... Read more >

Photog Colbert’s Elephantine Pied-à-Terre, Tea Bags Included, Asking $20 M.
by Max Abelson  |  6:36 PM February 17, 2009

This article was published in the February 23, 2009, edition of The New York Observer.
 

It’s very easy to resent someone with a multimillion-dollar luxury condo in the once-genuine East Village, especially if after a few years he puts it back on the market for more than three times what he paid. But the photographer Gregory Colbert, with his black-and-gray ponytail waving around as he gives a guest a tour, is hard to dislike.

“How tall are you? Six feet! Stand in the center!” said Mr. Colbert on Monday evening, trying to calculate the height of his 6,750-square-foot, 149-year-old loft’s vaulted living room.

The former concert hall, apparently 42 feet at its crown, looks like some sort of Victorian train station, but with aboriginal spears and an Indian daybed plunked nowhere in particular, and, on the far wall, one of Mr. Colbert’s gargantuan, soft-hearted, sepia-toned photographs of a boy and an elephant kneeling together.

His apartment, in a relatively anonymous building at 210-214 East Fifth Street, went on the market for $19.95 million late last week. “This building has its own songs,” the photographer said, “and, as a place you just come into, it has its own body language.”

Wearing blue jeans, a collarless white button-down and a suede blazer, he resembled a rich uncle and a stoned aunt. “I want to work in spaces that open you up,” he offered. “I don’t like alienating spaces—spaces where you feel like an alpha male with all kinds of testosterone—that want to hit you with an ax on the forehead, ‘Look at me and all my possessions!’”

The ceiling in his office/library, next door to the arched living room, is paneled with empty beeswax-coated teabags: “I bought a million,” he explained, “that were damaged by humidity.”

He briefly showed his master bedroom, long and mostly empty, with a nice white mattress nonchalantly on the floor. A massive flat-screen TV was next to the bed, but, he explained, only for viewing films. “I’m not a bourgeois,” he said. But then he turned to the master bathroom: “And, you see, all limestone.”
He pressed a button in the antique kitchen and two glass garage doors slid up to reveal a terrace.

His exhibit “Ashes and Snow” travels the world in what Mr. Colbert calls the Nomadic Museum (one Times review called its shots of exotic people dancing with animals “mystical,” a second called them “spectacularly vacuous”). That means he stays in the 10-room Manhattan pied-à-terre for only six or so weeks per year, though other artists are usually around. “It’s been a place where people get pollinated by New York. But I said, ‘You know what, I think I have to go back out and be what I am,’ which is a nomad. And nomads, you only take what you need.”

Can an apartment on East Fifth Street sell for $19.95 million right now? “We’re targeting people who have a creative aesthetic sense,” said Warburg’s Richard Steinberg, the listing broker. “We’re looking for people who are either in the entertainment or the arts, people who have alternative lifestyles.”

Alec Baldwin, E. L. Doctorow, Calvin Trillin and Jonathan Lethem were all in the loft this October for an Obama fund-raiser: “They say in India that when a person rises, an elephant laughs,” Mr. Colbert said then. “And when I saw Obama rising, I heard the elephants laughing.”

He paid only $6 million for the apartment four and a half years ago, so profits from the sale will go toward his global photography. “I have no intention of dying rich. I go on my expeditions,” he said. “They say in India, you make plans and the elephants laugh. I heard the elephants laughing and they said, ‘Gregory, keep going even more out.’”

 

< Read less

Curbed.com On the Market: $20 Million Loft in the East Village (Really!) Do take in the Palazzo Chupi-like scene pictured above, because that's the only glimpse currently available into photographer Gregory…... Read more >

Curbed.com
On the Market: $20 Million Loft in the East Village (Really!)

Do take in the Palazzo Chupi-like scene pictured above, because that's the only glimpse currently available into photographer Gregory Colbert's East Village loft, new to market at an asking price of $19.95 million. Before you chastise the man for such 2006ish thinking, we'll let the Observer's Max Abelson point out some highlights of the 6,750-square-foot space (w/ 800sf of outdoor space!): "The former concert hall, apparently 42 feet at its crown, looks like some sort of Victorian train station, but with aboriginal spears and an Indian daybed plunked nowhere in particular, and, on the far wall, one of Mr. Colbert's gargantuan, soft-hearted, sepia-toned photographs of a boy and an elephant kneeling together." Read on http://www.observer.com/2009/real-estate/photog-colbert-s-elephantine-pied-terre-tea-bags-included-asking-20-m for more fun facts, including a ceiling lined with teabags! Colbert paid $6 million for the condo just over four years ago, but this isn't some hollow cash grab; he says he'll use the proceeds to fund his global photography expeditions—and get away from the Cooper Square Hotel, which coincidentally recently opened steps away.

< Read less

BIG DEAL Every Man for Himself By JOSH BARBANEL Published: January 23, 2009 THE rich are different from you and me. In the era of multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, they are sometimes a bit more desperate.…... Read more >

BIG DEAL

Every Man for Himself
By JOSH BARBANEL
Published: January 23, 2009

THE rich are different from you and me. In the era of multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, they are sometimes a bit more desperate.

A few weeks ago, Richard Murphy, an unemployed hedge fund executive with a glorious limestone town house on East 67th Street, learned that the similarly lustrous town house next door was about to sell for nearly $25 million, the highest price for a town house in many months.

Rather than quietly savoring the good fortune of his neighbor, Janna Bullock, a developer who specializes in restoring town houses, Mr. Murphy sprang into action, according to several people familiar with the transaction.

He called the successful selling broker, Richard Steinberg of Warburg Realty, and suggested that it might be worth his time to try to interest the buyer, a Russian industrialist, in his house. Maybe he would find it more appealing, with its distinctive Ionic columns and four-story glass atrium in the rear, and buy it instead.

Mr. Murphy did not succeed in snagging the sale.

Perhaps he could be excused for his excessive zeal. He had moved to New York in 2007 to join a thriving $14 billion hedge fund known as the Fairfield Greenwich Group. His job: to prepare the group to go public and make the partners even more fabulously wealthy.

Now he is out of a job. It turns out that Fairfield Greenwich had invested more than $7 billion of its funds with Bernard L. Madoff, the disgraced investor accused last month of losing $50 billion of clients’ money in a Ponzi scheme.

Only a year and a half ago, Mr. Murphy had triumphantly moved to the upper echelons of the Upper East Side after a 20-year career as an investment banker in Europe, working for Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse. He paid $33 million for the 25-foot-wide house at 7 East 67th Street, buying it from Matthew Bronfman, an heir to the Seagram liquor fortune.

Now Mr. Murphy is listed as a defendant, along with other Fairfield Greenwich partners, in lawsuits brought by distraught investors.

Since the house next door closed on Jan. 12, Mr. Murphy has called in four top brokers, including Mr. Steinberg and Carrie Chiang of the Corcoran Group, to discuss the possible sale of his house.

In an interview, Mr. Steinberg, who still hopes to get the listing, confirmed that the conversation about the neighboring house took place, but declined to discuss the details. Mr. Murphy declined to comment.

According to brokers, Mr. Murphy was considering asking about $36 million for the house, which he upgraded after it was lavishly restored by Mr. Bronfman. Details include Venetian plaster in the public areas to bring in more light.

Built in 1882 and redesigned in 1900, the house has a limestone entry room with a fireplace, and a grand staircase leading to a parlor. It has 12,000 square feet of space on seven levels, including the basement.
But brokers were skeptical that he would get that price, with one suggesting it might eventually sell for $30 million at most, about 10 percent less than he paid.

In 2007, when Mr. Murphy bought the house, he paid the highest price on record for an Upper East Side town house built on a standard 25-foot-wide lot. Now it ranks third.

And Mr. Murphy, who is looking for work in New York and London, may hold off selling in case he finds a position here, brokers said.

The outlook for investment banking jobs may be bleak, but bleakness is not an unknown concept in the house. Before Mr. Bronfman bought it in 1994 for $3 million, it was owned, property records show, by the Foundation for Depression and Manic Depression.

 

< Read less

BIG DEAL She Fixes the Stoop to Conquer By JOSH BARBANEL Published: January 16, 2009 EVEN in a down real estate market, a town house with curb appeal can still sell. That’s what Janna Bullock, a developer,…... Read more >

BIG DEAL

She Fixes the Stoop to Conquer
By JOSH BARBANEL
Published: January 16, 2009

EVEN in a down real estate market, a town house with curb appeal can still sell.

That’s what Janna Bullock, a developer, and Richard Steinberg, her broker at Warburg Realty, kept saying as a 25-foot-wide Beaux-Arts town house lingered on the market at 9 East 67th Street, just off Fifth Avenue, a few doors from Central Park.

The house has been listed on and off for nearly three years, and during that time Ms. Bullock tried everything. She offered it in unrenovated condition, and she invited decorators to dress it up as a show house. She took it off the market to remove most of their work and completely renovate the interior. She tried different asking prices (up to $35 million at one point) and different brokers.

Nothing seemed to work until she received permission from the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission to recreate a limestone front stoop and grand entryway to the parlor floor. The stoop had been ripped out and replaced by a garish storm window when the house was divided many years ago into at least 13 apartments with a below-grade entrance.

As the steps were being replaced in November, a buyer came to call as if by magic, Ms. Bullock said. On Monday, she closed on the purchase of the five-story town house for $24.925 million. It has 10 fireplaces with carved stone mantels, a terrace and 13,000 square feet of space.

It was just in the nick of time for Mr. Steinberg, who was about to be replaced by another broker, Nikki Field of Sotheby’s International Realty.

“When his exclusive was about to expire, he popped up with a buyer,” Ms. Bullock said. “It was a miracle.”

Aaron Shmulewitz, a partner at the law firm of Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman, represented the buyer, but would not identify the purchaser beyond “European industrialist.”

The sale brought the highest price on an Upper East Side town house since the summer, before the faltering economy and the collapse of several Wall Street firms damped the luxury real estate market.

Ms. Bullock, who is developing several other Upper East Side properties, said the experience convinced her that there was still a market for redeveloped town houses, but only if they were finished with the finest design and workmanship, the latest gadgets and home-building materials found in new luxury homes.

“It signifies that even when bad things are happening, good design is appreciated in the market,” she said.

Ms. Bullock said she understood that the buyer first saw the house when visiting a neighbor, but had not taken much notice until the new stoop was almost complete. The last bit of ironwork was not installed until the day before the closing, she said.
< Read less

Inside the home of Richard and Renée Bross Steinberg Living in a jewel box 12/02/2008 In a mansion that was once the residence of famed songwriter Irving Berlin, residential real estate brokers Richard…... Read more >

Inside the home of Richard and Renée Bross Steinberg
Living in a jewel box
12/02/2008

In a mansion that was once the residence of famed songwriter Irving Berlin, residential real estate brokers Richard Steinberg and Renée Bross Steinberg have carved out a home — literally.

That is, the Steinbergs live in one of six apartments hewn out of the 50-foot-wide, 25,000-square-foot mansion at 3 East 75th Street, which was the family home of Berlin's wife, Ellin Mackay, and where he reportedly wrote "White Christmas."

Both the Steinbergs — who work as a team that includes their daughter Sarah Fiszel at Warburg Realty — knew they'd found their home from the moment they caught sight of the seven-story limestone mansion's crumbling first-floor library about five years ago.

Richard, a senior managing director at Warburg, had been inspecting the early 20th-century mansion with the developers, Dominion Management, advising them about purchasing and refurbishing it.

A broker since 1985 when he left the podiatry profession, Steinberg grosses over $100 million in sales annually, with a special expertise in selling opulent townhouses and mansions. He also frequently consults with developers and invests in development projects, often those in which townhouses are converted back into single-family homes. He is working as a development consultant on 180 East 93rd Street and on the conversion of the Claremont Stables on West 89th Street.

"When Richard showed me this place, which was in a state of disarray, I said to him that day, 'Wow, we should live in a place like this one day,'" says Renée, who is a managing director at Warburg and tends to focus on co-op sales. "About a year and a half later, Richard came home one day and said, 'I think you're right. We should move to that place.'"

Richard, who counts among his achievements having sold the same townhouse three times in one year (a real estate feat he's realized twice), says some apartments are just destined for certain people.

"I believe you match the purchaser with the property, and if they truly like the property, you don't have to call them to hound them five times; you don't have to get them to increase their bid; you don't have to force them to do anything," he says.

Besides such aesthetic touches as a wrought-iron fence and lobby with sweeping marble staircase, 3 East 75th Street also has a doorman and a concierge, and is only steps from Central Park. The triplex penthouse there sold for $20 million in August to James Chanos, the president and founder of the hedge fund Kynikos.

"I always think of this apartment as a Tiffany blue box with a white ribbon," Renée says, referring to her own apartment in the building. "I think it's a jewel. It's not big, but there are very few comparisons to it. In real estate, everything is 'what's your comp?' There is no comp to this."

The 1,200-square-foot apartment was made from the original library and two small bedrooms. It's a good size for the Steinbergs, whose two grown children are no longer at home. They merged the two bedrooms into one and combined the living room, dining room and kitchen in the former library space.

The library's 16-foot ceilings with ornate molding enabled the couple to raise the kitchen by several feet. Because their apartment is so much smaller than their previous 3,500-square-foot home, the Steinbergs worked closely with designer Ken Alpert, a principal at KA Design Group, to maximize storage space.

As in a boat, there is hidden storage space, underneath their kitchen floor and in other places, accessed by doors camouflaged to resemble the walls. The Steinbergs chose multipurpose furniture, such as an elegant coffee table that slides back and doubles as a dining tray in front of the TV.

"We just wanted to feel like we were in this ultra-luxurious hotel suite," Richard says. "That's how we wanted to live."

The lavish touches throughout the apartment, often accessories designed by Richard Mishaan, such as two round white vases in the living room, have helped achieve that. They also have two fur throws by Dennis Basso, one in the living room and one in the bedroom.

When the two existing bedrooms were combined into one, they ended up with such a large space that they were able to bring out the walls to create floor-to-ceiling closet space. The Steinbergs also closed up a window over the bed and incorporated a plush window seat in the bedroom.

"We only have a north- and a south-facing window, so we designed all the doors to be sheer, so when you come in it helps to reflect more light," Renée says.

While the master bath was large enough for a tub and shower, the powder room of the apartment's entrance was small, so the Steinbergs made it particularly showy, with fixtures by Waterworks and Maya Romanoff's golden mother-of-pearl shells for wall tile. "It took them three days to lay these," Richard says.

The Steinbergs didn't want to use the apartment for formal entertaining, but with its close proximity to their offices on 76th Street, they knew they might periodically have people over for drinks.

"Our task was to come up with a look that would be exciting and appealing when they had company over, but also very comfortable, because 95 percent of the time it's just Renée and Richard hanging out, watching television, eating," Alpert says.

They accomplished that goal largely by using Missoni fabrics, he said. "They're exciting, and the patterns are fabulous, and they had metallic threads in them," Alpert says. "We used them on draperies, on pillows, on those things that the eye sees but that are not really what you sit on. So Renée and Richard didn't compromise comfort, but they gave the look."

Alpert suggested the kitchen be as spare as possible, with roll-top cabinets and a washer and dryer tucked away beneath the countertops. He chose a sleek, stainless steel kitchen by Bulthaup.

That worked well, because the Steinbergs typically eat out, and use the kitchen only for breakfast or as a bar area. Renée has converted one corner of the kitchen into her work area and uses the cabinets as file drawers.

"If we had done the kitchen and apartment in a traditional way, it would have been too crowded and heavy," Alpert said. "There's much less to stop your eye now. When you walk into the apartment, you look at their art more than the furniture."

And the Steinbergs' art, selected with the help of art dealer Joan Genser, is eye-catching. The couple, married for 37 years, like to joke that they have completely opposing tastes in art, which lends a dramatic tension to the apartment.

"Of all the views that we share in common, we do not agree at all when it comes to art," Renée says. "So Rob Wynne is my favorite artist, and Matt Godwin and Reuven Cohen are Richard's choices."

While Wynne's "Exhale" is a tranquil citing, and the patterns are fabulous, and they had metallic threads in them," Alpert says. "We used them on draperies, on pillows, on those things that the eye sees but that are not really what you sit on. So Renée and Richard didn't compromise comfort, but they gave the look."

Alpert suggested the kitchen be as spare as possible, with roll-top cabinets and a washer and dryer tucked away beneath the countertops. He chose a sleek, stainless steel kitchen by Bulthaup.

That worked well, because the Steinbergs typically eat out, and use the kitchen only for breakfast or as a bar area. Renée has converted one corner of the kitchen into her work area and uses the cabinets as file drawers.

"If we had done the kitchen and apartment in a traditional way, it would have been too crowded and heavy," Alpert said. "There's much less to stop your eye now. When you walk into the apartment, you look at their art more than the furniture."

And the Steinbergs' art, selected with the help of art dealer Joan Genser, is eye-catching. The couple, married for 37 years, like to joke that they have completely opposing tastes in art, which lends a dramatic tension to the apartment.

"Of all the views that we share in common, we do not agree at all when it comes to art," Renée says. "So Rob Wynne is my favorite artist, and Matt Godwin and Reuven Cohen are Richard's choices."

While Wynne's "Exhale" is a tranquil cloud of crystal bubbles, Godwin's "Women Gone Wild" is a painting of bright colors that captures a mood of frustration and owes a debt to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"Our deal is we don't have to agree on art, but if Renée really likes it very much, she gets to buy it," Richard says. "If I like it very much, I get to buy it. It's a shared interest, but our taste is opposite."

Last year, Renée fell in love with two Robert Longo paintings at Art Basel Miami that failed to captivate Richard. But when she returned to their home near the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, she found that her husband had purchased the Longos and hung them prominently over the sofa.

The Steinbergs also have a home in East Hampton, N.Y., behind the Maidstone Arms Inn and Restaurant — "all our homes are in the village center," Richard says — and they like to switch out their art frequently.

Genser, who worked closely with the Steinbergs to select their art, said that while she doesn't classify the Steinbergs as collectors, they are passionate about their art.

"It's difficult when people are not in the same pew," she says. "He's always wanted a Nevelson; she didn't really care for a Nevelson. She always wanted Longo; he didn't want Longo in there.

"But they did finally end up buying what they liked, and they bought it to go on the walls, and it looks great."

< Read less

Greystone Develops $3M - $7M Green Condos in New York’s Carnegie Hill Neighborhood Published: July 22, 2008    By Lisa Iannucci, Green Building Correspondent New York--Manhattan’s Carnegie…... Read more >

Greystone Develops $3M - $7M Green Condos in New York’s Carnegie Hill Neighborhood
Published: July 22, 2008 
 
By Lisa Iannucci, Green Building Correspondent

New York--Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill neighborhood -- known for its mansions and townhouses -- will soon be a little greener with nine three- and four-bedroom green condominiums now in construction.

Developed by New York-based Greystone Property Development and designed by Barry Rice Architects, the homes will include recycled, local and sustainable materials, a geothermal well that will feed the primary heating and cooling system; and collected rainwater to irrigate the private bi-level garden.

“At Greystone, we are committed to developing buildings that are innovative and eco-conscious,” says Jeffrey Simpson of Greystone Property Development. “Geothermal heat pumps allow for more functional space in the building, less noise for neighbors and most importantly, lower energy costs for residents. Green is golden as far as we’re concerned.”

Green is golden, but it does come with a slightly higher price tag. Although Greystone wouldn’t comment on the cost and financing of the project, they do admit that green features are increasing development costs. However, this isn’t stopping them from applying for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification through the U.S. Green Building Council, or from publicizing this during their sales presentations.

Richard Steinberg of Warburg Realty, sales director for the project, emphasizes the environmentally-conscious nature of the building as well as its energy efficiency, which Greystone says, “is a big plus for buyers.”

Other eco-friendly features that will help with certification include energy-efficient insulation, ENERGY STAR appliances and water-saving fixtures throughout the building, mechanical and electrical codes that exceed standards and low emissions paint, solvents, carpet, caulking and window glass. Residents at 180 East 93rd St. will also appreciate the latest in home automation with cutting-edge technology for customized environmental control. From just one integrated interface, owners can adjust climate, multi-room audio, multi-media entertainment, surveillance, security and lighting.

Each home also features water-saving Dornbracht fittings, oversized showers, soaking tubs, and double-sink vanities. Amenities include doorman service, a children’s playroom, temperature controlled wine storage, outdoor space and a fitness facility.

The units are now available and cost between $3 million and $7 million.

< Read less

N E W  Y O R K  R E A L  E S T A T E      N E W S New developments using geothermal pumps for AC June, 09, 2008 Not all heat rises. Some new air-conditioning…... Read more >

N E W  Y O R K  R E A L  E S T A T E     
N E W S

New developments using geothermal pumps for AC

June, 09, 2008

Not all heat rises. Some new air-conditioning units are using geothermal heat pumps to pump heat—absorbed by water—deep underground where the heat is dispersed in the chilly subterranean soil before returning to the surface. These pumps are more expensive to install, but can pay for themselves in a decade. They use about half the electricity of typical air-conditioners and emit less carbon. Buildings investing in the technology include a seven-story condo building at 180 East 93rd Street.

 

< Read less

WHAT'S HOT OR NOT By KATHERINE DYKSTRA April 10, 2008 -- THIS time last year, we took a look at on-the-rise developments that tickled our fancy - whether it was because of design or price or amenities…... Read more >

WHAT'S HOT OR NOT
By KATHERINE DYKSTRA

April 10, 2008 --
THIS time last year, we took a look at on-the-rise developments that tickled our fancy - whether it was because of design or price or amenities or location. Now, with everyone and his broker weighing in on today's market, we decided to touch base with those projects to see how they're doing.

We can't say that we were surprised by what we found. If our sample set is any indication, people still want to live in high-end buildings in Manhattan.

Since last September, when 133 W. 22nd St. started sales, 89 of 99 units have sold for between $1,300 and $1,600 per square foot, says developer Rob Kaliner of the Ascend Group. And over on the East Side, at the Yoo by Starck-designed Gramercy building on East 23rd Street, 191 of 207 units have sold since sales launched last May, says broker Michael Shvo. Prices have ranged from $1,200 to $2,000 per square foot.

At 141 Fifth Ave., the conversion of the Merchants Bank of New York building, 31 of 38 units have been snapped up at, on average, $1,850 per square foot, says broker Steven Ganz of Core Group Marketing. Still on the market are three penthouses (including a $12 million cupola unit), which were released in December.

"We've had a lot of people coming back for second and third showings [of the penthouses]," says Ganz.

Over at the Diamond House, the condo-conversion of a 1940s-era rental building on East 77th Street, 21 of 22 available units have sold, says broker Richard Steinberg of Warburg Realty. (About 25 percent of the building is still in the hands of renters.)

"We sold out in six months, save this one unit," Steinberg says.

Per square foot, the units began at about $1,200 and with pricing amendments reached $1,400.

In less prime areas of Manhattan, where the pricing tends to be lower, sales haven't been as swift.
Of the 81 units at the conversion of 865 UN Plaza in Midtown East, 36 apartments are in contract, 15 are on the market, six have yet to be released and 24 renters remain. Units are priced at about $1,100 per square foot, with some units selling for less than $1,000 per square foot.

At 212, another rental-to-condo conversion in Midtown East, 67 percent of the 261 units are signed or closed, according to Corcoran Sunshine's Anne Young, director of sales and marketing at 212. The building has been on sale since the end of April 2007.

At Harlem's Dover, two brownstones on West 123rd Street comprising 12 homes, half of the units are in contract at around $650 per square foot. In order to attract buyers to the remaining units, two of which are duplexes with spiral staircases, the developer is willing to rethink the layout.

"Instead of using the spiral staircase, we can install a glass elevator for an additional $45,000," says Simon Shamilzadeh of Manor Properties Group, which is selling the Dover. "Another option is to remove the spiral staircase and include a regular staircase."

Step out of Manhattan and sales have flat-out lagged.

The Arbor, which is located in Riverdale in The Bronx and has been on the market for well more than a year, has sold just 20 percent of its 127 units.

"I have to tell you, it's been slow sales in Riverdale," says Monica Klingenberg of the Marketing Directors, which is selling the Arbor.

That said, sales have picked up as the Arbor has neared completion, Klingenberg says. The building is three or four months away from move-ins.

"People can see the finished product, which has helped," says Klingenberg. "The thing about the Riverdale market, they're not familiar with pre-sales."

Roberta Benzilio of Halstead Property, which is selling Rockwell Place, the conversion of a former piano warehouse in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has had to rely on forward-thinking buyers.

"We're selling mostly to couples. There are a couple of singles, young professionals who really understand what's going on in downtown Brooklyn and love the BAM cultural district," says Benzilio, who reports that 22 of Rockwell Place's 37 apartments are in contract.

"[There are] artistic people who have come to me and said, 'What's the next best neighborhood, the up-and-coming neighborhood?'"

< Read less

May 2007 How it feels... to be part of a husband-wife real estate team Richard Steinberg, senior managing director, and Renee Bross Steinberg, managing director, Warburg Realty, married for 34 years.…... Read more >

May 2007
How it feels... to be part of a husband-wife real estate team

Richard Steinberg, senior managing director, and Renee Bross Steinberg, managing director, Warburg Realty, married for 34 years.

As told to Lauren Elkies

Richard:

We are one of the first husband-and-wife teams. I was a doctor originally. In 1985 I decided to go into real estate.

We work together on each client but, I guess, our focus of duties for that client is different.

Renee does a lot of the initial showings. I like to think of myself as the closer.

Renee is much more detail-oriented than me. Renee has more patience than I do, and I have a greater sense of negotiation.

The beauty of a team with a family member is that no one has a better vested interest in your success than a family member.

We have a daughter, Sarah Fiszel [licensed salesperson at Warburg] who's 28, and she is also in the business with us. We are really husband and wife and daughter.

The biggest challenge for Renee and me is to maintain the boundaries between our business life and our personal life.

We try very hard not to bring business to the dinner table.

We consciously check ourselves. When we get home after a hard day of work or if we are at our weekend house, if one of us starts talking about business, one of us will say, "stop."

We try to go away for three- or four-day vacations two times a month.

We are very sensitive to the fact that we need to do things apart. We do try to go out with our friends separately.

We actually both love golf, so we play golf together. Renee loves to spin, and I don't. I like to ski. We try to do activities alone.

Monday nights I usually go to the movies alone.

Renee likes serious movies. I like very light-hearted and superficial movies. Our movie tastes are completely opposite, so quite often we go to movies alone.

Getting along in business is no harder than getting along in a marriage. It's just being constantly aware of each other's feelings.

Renee:

I was very happy with my career teaching first grade at the Collegiate School [on the Upper West Side], but then I watched what Richard was doing and I thought, "I should do this."

So, I started in real estate in 1990.

Richard will pretty much handle the pricier and the high-end clients.

I'm pretty much happy to work with anyone at any price as long as there is a referral. At this point in my life, I don't want to work with someone I don't know.

I love to show property when it's our exclusive.

Richard is definitely the closer, 100 percent.

I could even be working with my own client and he has nothing to do with it, but I always ask him what he thinks, always when it comes to the financials. I just want him to tell me, "yes, they can afford it."

If there's a conflict over a deal, we give each other space and do not talk about it. We never argue in the office. And if we're angry with each other, we ignore each other and wait until we get in the car or are walking.

 

 

< Read less

New York Social Diary Richard Steinberg of Warburg Realty   Everybody is aware that Richard Steinberg is a boldface name in the real estate world but few know that the top producer…... Read more >

New York Social Diary
Richard Steinberg of Warburg Realty

 

Everybody is aware that Richard Steinberg is a boldface name in the real estate world but few know that the top producer and senior managing director at Warburg Realty Partnership got his foot in the door by walking in the back door.

Two decades ago, he was a successful podiatrist who specialized in sports medicine and owned six clinics in the city. His hobby was buying and selling houses, so it was easy for him to trade the foot for the footprint. “I’ve always been a frustrated architect, and I took courses in it in college,” he says. “Real estate and medicine are a lot alike, because in each you have to develop a relationship with the client. You have to establish a level of trust in each field.”

Richard, who has worked with clients to turn many of Manhattan’s most magnificent townhouses back into single-family homes, says it is thrilling to have a major role in remaking history. “I’m passionate about bringing these homes back to their original grandeur so they reflect the grand quality of life in the early 20th Century,” he says, “and I’m fascinated by the interpretation of space. You can show the same home to five people, and you will get five different interpretations that will reflect the personality of each buyer.”

He counts himself among the fortunate: He and his wife of 34 years, Renee Bross Steinberg, who is a managing director of Warburg, live in one of the grand old mansions that they have dedicated themselves to restoring. The 40-foot-wide townhouse at 3 E. 75th St., which has been divided into six condos, was once the home of Irving Berlin. “The house belonged to his in-laws,” says Richard, “and it is where he wrote ‘White Christmas.’”

When Richard has free time, he’s most likely to be found on location hitting the ski slopes at his condo in Aspen or teeing off at his home in Palm Beach.

Regardless of where he works or plays, Richard, 55, revels in rearranging and redesigning spaces. It is, after all, like performing surgery, which is something he really does miss. “Our projects are elegant, understated and chic,” he says, adding that “real estate isn’t my career, it’s my passion.”

 

< Read less

Hotbed of activity from Harlem to Lower East Side; Warburg MarketingGroup Warburg Marketing Group, a division of Warburg Realty Partnership, has released an activity update on some of the developments…... Read more >

Hotbed of activity from
Harlem to Lower East Side;
Warburg MarketingGroup

Warburg Marketing Group, a division of Warburg Realty Partnership, has released an activity update on some of the developments currently being marketed.

From the historically-rich Harlem neighborhoods to the trendy and eclectic Lower East Side, Warburg is responsible for new developments throughout New York.

Among its newest properties is the conversion of 22 Riverside Drive, a grand prewar 19-story luxury building located in the West End Collegiate Historic Renovation District that is being converted to condominium ownership.

The stunning landmark building features superbly-restored and renovated residences with spectacular river and park views. Prices for the condominiums range from $1.2 million to $8.5 million. The renovations are expected to be complete with units ready for occupancy by July. Model units will be ready to view by mid-June.

Other current activity includes 2132 Second Avenue, Crown Condominium. Located at 110th Street and 2nd Avenue in East Harlem, this nine-story 30 unit luxury condominium features one-bedroom and two-bedroom luxury apartments ranging in size from 498 to 1,027 s/f. Prices for the condominiums range from $249,000 to $720,000.

Parkside Condominium on St. Nicholas Avenue between 112th and 113th Street, just a few blocks from Central Park, is a nine-story luxury boutique building featuring grand-scale apartments ranging in size from 900 to 2,000 s/f. Prices for these family-sized residences range from $550,000 to $1.5 million. Three out of five residential units are already in contract.

Located in one of the most desirable areas of the East Village, 321 East 12th Street, West/East Village are two contiguous six-story walk-up buildings located between First and Second Avenue, featuring pre-war one, two and three-bedroom co-op apartments. Purchasers have the option of buying apartments "as is" or fully renovated. Prices range from mid $300,000-$800,000.

< Read less

Stephon to Net Perry Street Condo?   June 19, 2006 For New York Knicks players, a good way to get over this woeful season could be to treat oneself to something nice—say a $6.95 million apartment…... Read more >

Stephon to Net Perry Street Condo?
 
June 19, 2006

For New York Knicks players, a good way to get over this woeful season could be to treat oneself to something nice—say a $6.95 million apartment in the Richard Meier–designed towers on Perry Street.
 
Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury recently checked out such a pricey pad, according to a source with knowledge of the listing.
 
The 3,692-square-foot apartment includes floor-to-ceiling windows, providing superb city and Hudson River views. The full-service building also features a 24-hour doorman, concierge and state-of-the-art fitness room.
 
The Perry Street towers have been a celebrity outpost ever since they hit the market several years back—attracting notables like Calvin Klein, Martha Stewart and Vincent Gallo. But the building has never been popular with sports superstars.
 
As of now, there’s no word on whether the Brooklyn native is ready to relocate to the West Village’s glass-and-steel fishbowl. Through a spokesperson, Mr. Marbury declined to comment on his real-estate interests.
 
Warburg Realty’s senior managing director, Richard Steinberg, and his colleague Sarah Fiszel have the listing.

< Read less

In a crowded, hyped field, a legitimate "best block" for New York City emerges Iconic townhouses and old money add to allure of East 70th Street between Park and Lexington avenues By Alison Gregor, March…... Read more >

In a crowded, hyped field, a legitimate "best block"
for New York City emerges

Iconic townhouses and old money add to allure of East 70th Street
between Park and Lexington avenues

By Alison Gregor, March 2006

 
Real estate lexicon has no shortage of superlatives, which crowds the playing field for a concept like "the best block in New York City."

Nevertheless, the level of activity on East 70th Street between Park and Lexington avenues makes it a bona fide contender, both in terms of buzz and bucks -- the marquee townhouses that line its sidewalks are fetching eyebrow-raising prices from top-tier buyers. The block is the future home of film director Woody Allen -- who in February reportedly purchased 118 East 70th Street for an unknown sum. New listings and a $24.5 million purchase last month have kept the street in boldface type of late, particularly among the city's elite real estate brokers.

They say the neighborhood has a certain je ne sais quoi -- but when asked, seem more than willing to try to pin it down.

"The feeling you get when you go into this [block] is so much better than when you go into any other place," said Richard Steinberg, a senior managing director at Warburg Realty Partnership. "It's the most beautiful townhouse block in New York City."

Steinberg handled the sale of a 30-foot townhouse on the north side of the block for $11.4 million in early 2005. A developer intending to reconfigure the existing apartments back into a single-family home seemed ready to move ahead with his plans. Then an unexpected buyer showed up: president and executive creative director of Coach Inc., Reed Krakoff, who bought the property for $17 million in the fall of 2005, according to property records.

"We had an unsolicited offer from a very prominent New Yorker, who's going to use it for his family home," Steinberg said. "This gentleman could have bought anything anywhere for his family, and he felt this was the most beautiful block in New York."

As of early February, two other properties on the block were listed for sale, one of which had sold by the middle of the month. A 40-foot townhouse at 125 East 70th Street owned by the late philanthropist Paul Mellon and his widow Rachel Lambert Mellon -- a pedigree that some brokers say has been a big draw for the block since the 1960s, when the house was built -- sold for $24.5 million. It's noted for its striking French-style façade (but rather cramped interior). The other property was 110 East 70th Street, which listed for $17 million on the south side of the block, a 20-foot house that has been lavishly renovated, brokers say.

So what is it about 70th Street between Park and Lexington that has captivated elite buyers? Much of it has to do with the housing stock on the block, as well as the neighboring properties on north 69th and south 71st Streets, which also have squat townhouses.

"They're low buildings, so you've got your light," said Laurence Kaiser IV, president of Key-Ventures Realty. "And you have gardens facing gardens -- not gardens facing up against an apartment wall. It's built to a human scale."

Jed Garfield of Leslie J. Garfield & Co., a firm of townhouse experts, agreed that this portion of East 70th Street is similar to East 95th Street between Park and Lexington, backing up against very low buildings. Also, the street has wider sidewalks than other Upper East Side blocks.

"So many blocks of New York City are chopped up with these larger prewar or postwar buildings that cast shadows," he said. "So just from an aesthetic view, this is an attractive block."

That's a particularly valuable attribute for some buildings, like 110 East 70th Street, a turn-of-the-previous-century townhouse that has three exposures in back rooms because of a wedge laced with greenery lying between it and the condominiums at 715 Park Avenue, Kaiser said. "It has windows on all four sides, and there's nothing to the right of it, which is highly unusual," agreed listing broker Suzanne Sealy of Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The block is known as an iconic townhouse row because out of its two dozen properties, about half are single-family homes currently and two are being reconfigured into single-family homes.

"In my opinion, it's the most homogenous street," said Steinberg, who recently sold a 20-foot Victorian-style townhouse with multiple dwellings and commercial space at 130 East 70th Street for $6.5 million to a development team planning to convert it to a single-family home.

Steinberg said he anticipates the new home, which is being designed by Eric Cohler, will be listed for $14.5 million in the coming months. Chances are the Victorian-style townhouse may do well on a block that has seen prices shoot upward in the past few years.

The Georgian-style house reportedly purchased by Allen last traded in 1998 for $6.8 million -- a phenomenally high price at the time for a 20-footer -- while the asking price was $7.3 million, said Sami Hassoumi, managing director and townhouse specialist at Brown Harris Stevens. The asking price in early January had reportedly more than tripled to $25.9 million, though the house was expected to have traded at a somewhat smaller figure, perhaps $20 million.

"There's definitely something special about that house," Hassoumi said. "It sounds pretty basic, but it's so hard to find those houses that are simple and elegant and airy throughout."

Besides these high-profile homes, the "average" properties of East 70th Street continue to attract well-heeled buyers drawn to the many architectural styles on display. "You have different forms of architecture, from Palladian to Georgian to neo-Classical to modern," Steinberg said. "You have an Edward Durell Stone house."

The block draws minimal traffic, increasing the arcadian ambiance, but isn't far from supermarkets and boutiques. Garfield adds that three of the city's most coveted co-ops are on Park Avenue at 70th Street, which most likely adds to the block's allure. "When people talk about the best co-operative buildings in New York, they always talk about 720, 730, and 740, which are right at the end of the block," Garfield said.

Kirk Henckels, director of Stribling Private Brokerage, said East 70th Street rivals at least one other block in the city for renown. East 64th Street between Fifth and Madison avenues is the city's showcase mansion block. There were three sales of mansions there hovering between $20 and $30 million in the past year. Connoisseurs consider mansions to be freestanding homes more than 25 feet wide. The two blocks each have their own distinct charm.

"Now, East 70th Street may be a more classic townhouse block -- as opposed to a mansion block -- but it's certainly everybody's favorite in that sense," Henckels said. "It's a beautiful tree-lined street, and it has beautiful traditional townhouses."

Among other Upper East Side blocks rivaling East 70th Street, brokers say, are 71st Street between Fifth and Madison; 62nd Street between Fifth and Madison; 80th Street between Park and Lexington; 67th Street from Fifth to Madison; and lengths of 73rd and 78th streets.

< Read less

Feeling Settled? Must Be Time to Move By TERI KARUSH ROGERS   GIVEN the choice, many people refuse to submit to the agonies of moving until boxed in by romantic, reproductive or professional circumstances.…... Read more >

Feeling Settled?
Must Be Time to Move

By TERI KARUSH ROGERS
 
GIVEN the choice, many people refuse to submit to the agonies of moving until boxed in by romantic, reproductive or professional circumstances. But the opposite is true for serial movers, who eagerly hop back on the open-house circuit even before the aroma of fresh paint and polyurethane begins to fade -- that is, if they ever stopped looking in the first place.

Rachel Natalie Klein, 34, has lived in seven apartments in the five years since she arrived in Manhattan. Her most recent move, last June, was to a newly renovated $1,500-a-month, 1,000-square-foot walk-up in East Harlem, on 127th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Previously, she lived on the Upper West Side, in the East Village and in Midtown East.

While able to point to economics, romance or apartment-related annoyances as a justification for each move, she recognizes that her constant shifting makes her unusual in a city where finding even one decent dwelling is considered a victory worth savoring, not tossing aside.

''This last man I dated, he said he thought I was searching,'' said Ms. Klein, who agreed that her journey is a process of exploration.

Moving around ''is about seeing what fits and what doesn't,'' said Ms. Klein, a broadcast director at the public relations firm Kellen Communications, who often surfs real estate Web sites to unwind and indulge her curiosity about what's available and how other people live. She has even started chronicling her adventures in real estate and in her new neighborhood, East Harlem, in her blog, Bagel in Harlem (www.bagelinharlem.blogspot.com).

''When I move, I just feel like I'm going to attack a new neighborhood -- going to meet more people, going to find the new restaurants, find out what's going on,'' she said.

Among those who uproot infrequently, moving as a means of exploration is a foreign concept. They are more likely to equate transience with arrested development or a shiftiness a step away from check-kiting schemes.

It is certainly true, said Nancy J. Crown, a Manhattan clinical psychologist, that cookie-cutter explanations don't exist.

''It would always have to be understood within the context of the particular person and their unique history,'' Ms. Crown said. ''So you really couldn't say that moving a lot means the same thing for everyone. There are some people who -- either because of a lack of sense of who they are, or some feeling of inadequacy -- may want to redo themselves in one way or another again and again. Something new is like anything is possible -- you can sort of imagine yourself to be the person that you'd like to be.'' 

Lots of moving could also signal a fear of commitment and a consequent fear of closing off opportunities. Or, like procrastination, it can be a way to avoid failure. ''If it's constantly in process, you're never being judged for the finished product,'' said Ms. Crown, who also warned against overpathologizing the behavior. ''Not only does the same behavior mean different things to different people, but something one person might find intolerable, another person might really thrive from.''

Such benefits might include an outlet for creativity, or channeling a desire for upheaval in a less destructive way than, say, job- or bed-hopping.

Serial movers seem motivated by everything from a desire for exploration, to the perpetuation of habit born in childhood, to a hunger for drama and excitement, to a fondness for extreme housekeeping. And these days, such appetites are stoked by a smorgasbord of aggressively marketed new buildings engaging in a constant battle of one-upmanship.

''With the renters, I think it's about, where can I live that's going to be a little cooler,'' said Diane M. Ramirez, president of Halstead Property. ''I had a doorman and now I want a doorman and a gym, now I want a pool in the building. It's not that you can't stand the place you're living.''

Sabrina Seidner, managing director of the Upper West Side office of Nest Seekers International, observed, ''Really fancy rental buildings that have every imaginable amenity are becoming the norm.''

Whereas the rule of thumb for changing apartments used be every seven years, Ms. Seidner said it seems to have shrunk to something like two years among a larger swath of clientele, resembling a fashion trend.

Indeed, most of those interviewed wore their transience as a badge of honor. ''Moving to me is a symbol of independence and open-mindedness, of not being afraid to let go of things in your life, of being grounded by the right things and not by objects,'' said Bige Z. Doruk, 38, chief executive and president of Gaia Power Technologies, an energy storage and backup company. Ms. Doruk and her husband, Ib I. Olsen, 43, have moved four times within Lower Manhattan since they married in 2000.

Their current apartment -- the first they have owned -- is an 1,100-square-foot TriBeCa condo they bought for $665,000 in September 2003. They renovated it and, in January, put it on the market for $1.295 million.

Though they stand to pocket a sizable profit and have already found a bigger apartment, for $1.1 million, in the financial district, Ms. Doruk emphasized that for them, moving has never been about the money.

''I don't think we ever look at anything as our permanent home,'' she said, while acknowledging that the eventual schooling of her son, Kai, 2, might cut into the couple's mobility. ''That's our mentality -- we don't like getting complacent and too routine.''

Still, said Ms. Doruk, who was born in Turkey and moved often while growing up, ''to us it's important to really keep an open mind and not be one of these 60-year-olds who have done things the same way so long that they can't travel 200 miles to get somewhere. We see that people who don't move are more close-minded and have a tendency to get too fixated on things in their life.''

Like Ms. Doruk, many frequent movers experienced mobile childhoods. Therapists point out that any stress-inducing childhood event can be essentially re-enacted in adulthood without conscious intent or even recognition. Without commenting on Ms. Doruk specifically, Ms. Crown explained, ''If something happens to somebody that overwhelms them at a vulnerable time, any particular behavior pattern can become a way of trying to take that overwhelming experience and turn it into something you can have control over.''

Lauren May, 23, a public relations account executive, said she moved every two to three years as a child. On her own since graduating from college, she has upped the ante, moving three times in Manhattan in her two postgraduate years. ''If you're new to New York, it's extremely hard to find an apartment you like without going through a few duds first,'' she said, echoing the observations of real estate brokers and other frequent movers.

Nevertheless, she worries that her moves herald a troubling pattern. ''You grow up in a constantly volatile living situation, always picking up and going,'' she said. ''So when things settle down and get boring in your own life, you can always pick up and move. If something doesn't work, moving seems like an easier solution.''

Peripatetic upbringing or not, the chronic urge to move often seems less a permanent lifestyle choice than an outgrowth of a particular phase of life, during which a person either feels too settled (romantically, professionally or both) or is preoccupied with forging a new identity. The latter group, brokers say, typically includes the young-and-the-restless segment in their 20's and 30's, or people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who have finished raising their children. (Those still raising children, brokers say, are more likely to be prostrated into one place by the tangled roots of domesticity and a commensurate lack of energy.)

Wendy J. Sarasohn, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group, said her most mobile clients tend to be female empty-nesters. ''They've produced their children successfully, their kids are well launched, and then they need to address what's next for them,'' she said. ''And for many of the women, it will be to create a new home. It's beyond decorating.''

A certain subset set out to alter their bodies as well as their living arrangements in what becomes an escalating and intertwined addiction to change, Ms. Sarasohn said.

''I think some of the serial movers are the same as plastic surgery junkies -- people who look outside themselves for change and excitement,'' she said of the overlap that she has observed in some clients. ''First, someone starts with Botox, and then their eyes, and then the first home that they renovate, sell and make a profit, and then they get their neck done.''

For others, the urge to move coincides with the beginning of a committed relationship. It's as if they replace the drama and excitement of searching for a new partner with the drama and excitement of searching for -- and often renovating -- a new dwelling.

Herb Seilberger, 48, worked in the travel industry and lived a relatively rooted life before he met his partner, John-Alec Briggs, 40, a dozen years ago. Since then, they have moved five times: four in New York (with the help of Linda Gertler, a vice president at Corcoran), and this past September to Palm Springs, Calif.

Although the pair made money in the moving and found it somewhat addictive, Mr. Seilberger said, that didn't fully explain the wandering. The less tangible silver lining, he said, was the way the sense of adventure enlivened his relationship with his partner, who is an interior designer and architect. It also allowed Mr. Seilberger to finally make the break with New York and move to Palm Springs, a long-held dream.

The couple have been renovating their $750,000 home there, which has 11 palm trees and a pool, and just bought another property to live in temporarily, Mr. Seilberger said. They have also started a business buying and renovating condo units.

Mitchell J. Kassman, 48, has moved 15 times in the decade since he met his wife, Maria, now 41. The onset of his roving ways coincided with the end of a longish bachelorhood, but he steadfastly denied a connection.

''It's like trying to create a house that you really want,'' he said. ''When you fix up a house and you're done, you're looking for something else. It's like a kick or a drug. You keep searching. If you don't have children, you can keep on moving.''

Mr. Kassman, a salesman-turned-mortgage broker, started by renovating apartments in Manhattan that he found with the help of Scott Schiller, a senior vice president at the real estate brokerage firm Anchor Associates. Several years ago, Mr. Kassman turned to Long Island, after his father's death precipitated a move there to care for his mother. There, among other real estate adventures, he tried to bring his life full circle.

''When I was a little kid, all the rich kids lived in this area in Woodbury, so we bought this beautiful house in the Gates of Woodbury that I wanted to live in all my life and we fixed it up.'' He said he sold it in May (after living there for two years) because, it turned out, ''I didn't like the rich people.''

Mr. Kassman's wife, a bystander who is sanguine about changing homes the way others change slipcovers, put forth her own observations about her spouse's restlessness. ''He doesn't know how to settle down,'' she said. ''After he fixes the house, he's happy for a while. It's the honeymoon stage and everybody gives him compliments, and once that passes, he needs to start over.''

Many brokers asserted that renters are more restless than owners. Renters not only tend to be younger, with more flux-related issues, but also the transactional costs are less severe, and the end of a lease provides a natural transition. Unlike owners, who can eventually recoup some or all of the cost of gussying up their apartments when they feel the urge to upgrade, ''renters don't want to go into their pockets too deeply to improve their apartment,'' said Kevin M. Kurland, president of Kurland Realty.

Dennis M. Colwell Jr., 31, a Corcoran broker, falls into the serial-renter category. Mr. Colwell has rented five luxury high-rise apartments in three buildings in Jersey City since moving from Houston five years ago.

''Basically, the bottom line is I always want to have the cutting-edge apartment,'' he said. ''I want the latest floor plan, the best view, outdoor space.''

Mr. Colwell started out sharing a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates, and moved up by increments of $200. He now lives in a $2,800-a-month two-bedroom on the 35th floor of the Liberty Towers complex. It is, he says, the largest apartment in his building and the one with the best view. He estimated that a similar space in Manhattan would rent for about $6,000.

''People think it's crazy to move all the time, but to me moving is a great opportunity to, like, clean house,'' Mr. Colwell said. ''You don't have to dust under the beds, and you throw out the trash you've accumulated. You usually buy a few new pieces of furniture and paint the walls. So you're also in the latest trends in decorating.''

Mr. Colwell sees a blank canvas where others see cookie cutters and enjoys showing off his taste by frequently entertaining co-workers, friends and prospective clients.

Serial movers with fatter bank accounts tend to seek out condos and brownstones, said Kirk Henckels, the director of Stribling Private Brokerage. ''Co-ops are looking for stable tenancy,'' he said. ''If someone moved every three years or less, the boards would start asking questions.''

Mr. Henckels says his restless clients tend to be men who have made a lot of money on Wall Street and ''want to build and enjoy the process.''

''Basically, they're frustrated architects or contractors,'' he said.

But Richard Steinberg, a senior managing director at Warburg Realty, said that in his experience, the older wealthy men swooping in and out of $10-million-and-up residences shy away from renovations. ''I don't think they want to tie themselves up for a year,'' he said. ''These type-A personalities -- in the course of 12 months, their tastes can change.''

Stephanie Gurland, 62, a senior sales agent at Bellmarc and a self-described perfectionist who has moved about 25 times in 38 years, says that her motivation for moving has changed over the years. Her first 20 moves, mostly within Florida, occurred because ''I wasn't happy in my marriage,'' said Ms. Gurland, who eventually divorced. ''I was doing it to try to get happy. I was always looking for a better situation and more comfort in my life.''

Now on her fifth apartment in New York since moving here in 1991 -- she lives in a doorman studio on Central Park West for which she paid $379,000 in May -- she views her path as part moneymaking venture, part ''quest for the best'' and ''a form of reorganization.''

''You have to throw away a lot of stuff and buy new stuff,'' she said. ''I furnish each place from the floor up.''

Ms. Klein, the East Harlem renter, said that while she harbored no misgivings about her journey, she was surprised by how upset she was over a recent office move from the 17th floor to the 15th floor of the same Midtown building. ''I was not expecting an office move to be emotional,'' said Ms. Klein, who had been at the old office for five years. ''I'm discombobulated. Everything is new -- the fixtures are new, the furniture is new, the carpets are new.''

Would she adjust better to her new workspace if she had not cycled through so many apartments? Perhaps, she admitted. ''It was a bit of an anchor,'' she said, adding: ''The psychological ramifications of moving are vast and very interesting. They can take on a life of their own. There are a lot of boxes in one's life.''

< Read less

Big Euro Machers Will Crash Plaza: Ritzy Pied-a-Terres By Michael Calderone The entrance to the Plaza Hotel is now completely stockaded with chain-link fencing and plywood, the suited doormen replaced…... Read more >

Big Euro Machers Will Crash Plaza: Ritzy Pied-a-Terres

By Michael Calderone

The entrance to the Plaza Hotel is now completely stockaded with chain-link fencing and plywood, the suited doormen replaced with grubby porters ushering construction and demolition workers--and dumpsters--in and out of its fabled and much-filmed front door. Even the somewhat ridiculous (if obligatory) row of flags has been plucked from above the hotel's famous arcade.

But on a recent sunny day, tourists continued to ogle at the building's ornate Beaux-Arts facade. And when, at the end of next year, just in time for its centennial, the Plaza's elegant doors should swing open once again to welcome not only hotel guests but condo owners, they, too, are likely to be tourists: international tradesmen with millions to spend on a choice pied-a-terre.

"I think if you are coming in for a pied-a-terre in New York, you want to be centrally located," said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real-estate appraisal and consulting firm. "You're not so much looking to be in a residential neighborhood as opposed to proximity to midtown, the central business district."

The condominium developers are counting on these foreign nationals having money to burn--even in the hyper-inflated Manhattan real-estate market.

Given the amount of attention lavished on the condo proposal and landmark issues that were hotly debated last spring, it's no surprise that the offering plan has created a buzz. Opulent apartments on the building's highest floors, complete with far-reaching Central Park views, are expected to sell in the $30 million range.

Currently, the state attorney general's office is reviewing the condo-conversion offering plan, which should be completed by the end of October. As early as next month, the sales office could be buzzing with anxious buyers getting a glimpse of spec sheets, fulfilling a dream of owning a piece of the Plaza. Despite widespread speculation, the building's owners are trying to keep the plan under wraps.

On Oct. 7, a broker with Stribling & Associates--the exclusive sales and marketing company--spoke to The New York Sun about price estimates still under consideration in the attorney general's office. However, calls to the same broker are now immediately redirected to Elad Properties, the company that purchased the building for $675 million in August 2004 and is behind the $350 million renovation to a mixed-use building. And the Elad spokesman declined to comment.

But Elad's reluctance to dish hasn't stopped conjecture in the real-estate community, where brokers anticipate the 180 condo units will move quickly despite recent reports from leading brokerages indicating that the real-estate market is cooling down.

So, in the current market, are buyers willing to spend $30 million on a luxury condo that won't be ready until late 2006 or early 2007?

Flashy condo developments such as the Time Warner Center, One Beacon Court and 515 Park Avenue attracted their fair share of international businesspeople, the high-powered South American financier or Russian oligarch. In 2000, when the Ritz-Carlton, at nearby 50 Central Park South, began selling its upper floors as condos, corporate executives flocked to the building. Although 9/11 was a huge setback, the 11 full-floor apartments sold for tens of millions of dollars. (One resell is currently asking $35 million.)

And, importantly, the Plaza's international cachet plays a central role, making it an ideal pied-a-terre for the financial globetrotter.

"Of the people that I have mainly been talking to, this would not be their principal residence," said George van der Ploeg of Prudential Douglas Elliman. "I don't see [the Plaza] really as a family building."

Mr. van der Ploeg currently has a bicoastal couple searching for a secondary residence. They have expressed interest in obtaining a two- or three-bedroom apartment in the Plaza, which should cost $6.5 million or $8.5 million, respectively.

While prices will be looked at closely when the offering plan is approved, there are other factors to consider--especially maintenance costs. One luxury broker cautions that high maintenance fees at the Carlyle, despite its world-renowned status, warded off potential condo buyers.

"The maintenance is so extraordinary [at the Carlyle] that the inventory is slow to move," said one luxury specialist. "The maintenance will be a very important factor in the sales at the Plaza."

Transients

Another factor warding off permanent residents is the fact that the building will remain partly transient, with hotel guests coming and going.

Although the hotel was losing money in recent years, its provenance remains known across the world and should bring in plenty of travelers. However, with the condo units given the premium location (facing Central Park), hotel guests will be forced to gaze out on the far less appealing 58th Street.

In addition, Crain's New York Business reported on Oct. 10 that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal--who sold the entire building to Elad--is planning to buy back the hotel portion for $500 million, after the offering plan is approved. What the Prince does with the hotel portion could also affect the building's cachet.

The Two Towers

But if sales at another recent condominium development nearby are any indication, the Plaza's chances are good.

Around the corner of the park, the once grand Mayflower Hotel has been demolished, and a full-block project will soon take its place, between 61st and 62nd streets. Built by Zeckendorf Development, 15 Central Park West will rise from a site that is currently a massive hole in the ground next to Trump International Hotel and Tower. Designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern, the two buildings--43 stories and 20 stories high, respectively--will hold 202 new units.

Although 15 C.P.W. will not be completed until 2007, the sales office opened last month, and has been surprising many who felt the developers overpaid for the land. Almost half the apartments are currently under contract, with sales already topping $600 million, according to a real-estate source.

"We have signed contracts at all price points--from $2 million one-bedrooms to plus-$40 million for a penthouse," said Richard Wallgren, the project's director of sales. Having previously worked on the Time Warner Center when it came on the market, Mr. Wallgren said that sales are comparable to that project, but declined to specify.

However, according to a real-estate source, seven of the 15 penthouses are currently under contract, with prices ranging from $20.9 million to $43 million (already topping the price of $42.25 million paid by financier David Martinez at the nearby Time Warner Center in August 2003). Both the Plaza and 15 C.P.W. are expected to bring in about $3,000 to 4,000 per square foot, comparable to other recent high-end condominiums.

While both developments will be offering pricey apartments this fall, there are obvious differences, such as being on different sides of the park and the fact that one is a new construction while the other is a conversion.

If 15 C.P.W. doesn't have the Plaza's international stature, it can at least try to make up for that by dressing up in the traditional garb of Central Park West.

As opposed to the Time Warner Center's modern aesthetic, which clearly sets itself apart from neighboring buildings, 15 C.P.W. is quite deliberately designed to conform to some of New York's landmarks or famous apartment buildings. "What [15 C.P.W. is] trying to achieve is the prewar Central Park West building--buildings like the Majestic and the San Remo," said Richard Steinberg, senior managing director of Warburg Realty. Also, similar to the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and ultra-selective 740 Park Avenue, the building will be clad in Indiana limestone.

So for some wealthy buyers, the choice might come down to actual antiquity of the Plaza versus a hybrid building that meshes classic design with modern amenities. Regardless, both projects may be safe from a market slowdown by not being located in fringe areas.

"What these two projects have, that the other projects don't, is that they immediately have location," said Mr. Miller, who proved that restating the obvious might be each development's best selling point. "15 Central Park West is on Central Park West. And the Plaza is the Plaza. Those two already have an advantage going forward."

< Read less

House proud on UES: Mansion prices climb A Fifth Avenue address has never been cheap, but when it comes attached to a Manhattan mansion, the price tag may strain the bounds of belief. Over the past decade,…... Read more >

House proud on UES: Mansion prices climb

A Fifth Avenue address has never been cheap, but when it comes attached to a Manhattan mansion, the price tag may strain the bounds of belief.

Over the past decade, gargantuan homes have started to move in New York City, and recent asking prices are breaking records.

Relatives of Doris Duke, the late tobacco heiress, are asking $50 million for the Duke Semans Mansion at 1009 Fifth Avenue, a Beaux Arts style mansion with 19,000 square feet of space on eight levels.

Brokers who deal in this rarefied market of the city's largest homes--over 25 feet wide--anticipate more sales, primarily driven by families with young children where at least one member owns or works at a hedge fund.

"Townhouses are a natural move for high-net-worth individuals who, for many reasons, don't want to be in co-ops," said Alf Naman, a principal with Alf Naman Real Estate Advisors. "They don't want to disclose income, and they want more privacy. They can staff their own buildings and are more self-sufficient."

The priciest town house sale in Manhattan took place last year when Woody Allen sold his Carnegie Hill home for $24.5 million, according to Stribling & Associates. Currently, a number of Upper East Side mansion properties in mint condition could further push prices upward and set the tone for many years in the market, said Sami Hassoumi, a director with Brown Harris Stevens.

Hassoumi is representing Seagram's distillers scion Matthew Bronfman, the owner of 7 East 67th Street, who will not settle for less than $31 million despite numerous offers just shy of it.

Another home, owned by interior designer Joanne de Guardiola, at 20 East 64th Street, is listed at $29.5 million, he said.

And the Gianni Versace mansion, a 35-footer at 5 East 64th Street, is listed by the Corcoran Group at $32 million. "It's true that the prices are much higher than they used to be three, even two, years ago," Hassoumi said. "There was a period where it was a little slow to unload properties like these, but that doesn't mean nobody wants them."

"One of these three properties will trade, and it will command what the others will trade for," he said.

Naman's firm, along with Sotheby's International Realty, has the exclusive on 35-37 East 63rd Street, a 41-foot-wide house with ceilings as high as 25 feet, listed for $29.5 million.

The whole first floor is a gigantic parlor in which various potential buyers have envisioned building a spa with swimming pool, a squash or basketball court, or a movie screening room.

"There's substantial interest in mansions, due to the lack of housing inventory, but also because people want to create their own identities in their homes," Naman said. "That's very difficult to do when you're buying a 5,000- square-foot apartment in a cooperative building."

One limitation the super-rich face has to do with their aesthetic tastes. Many wealthy people collect contemporary art, and an apartment with 11- foot ceilings, even one beautifully designed by architect Rosario Candela, can't showcase large art installations, Naman said.

"What happens is certain buyers will go Downtown into loft spaces, but other buyers with children in school can't make that move," he said. "Their lives exist on the Upper East Side."

They are prime candidates for a mansion, and their demand for spacious living is driving up the price of townhouse space. Luxury townhouses in mint condition are trading for a price that approaches the dollar figure of the dearest high-end condominiums in Manhattan.

While condos and co-op sales set the records in New York real estate – Rupert Murdoch bought the late Laurance Rockefeller's triplex co-op at 834 Fifth Avenue last year for $44 million, and the highest- priced condo sale was a close $42.5 million at the Time Warner Center in 2003 – townhouses are starting to catch up.

"We see the top apartments trading in the high $3,000 to $4,000 a square foot range," Hassoumi said. "The townhouses used to trade for $1,000 to $1,500, but now this is jumping to well over $2,500 a square foot."

Even Brooklyn is getting into the act. In Brooklyn Heights, a townhouse at 140 Columbia Heights overlooking the promenade went on the market last month with a record asking price for the borough - $20 million.

Trends are slow to be set in the market for mansions, which occupy the pinnacle of townhouse stock, since there is so little inventory. Brokers say fewer than 50 homes qualify as mansions in Manhattan, stand-alone homes more than 25 feet wide with 10,000 square feet of space or more. Most are located on the Upper East Side in the 60s and 70s.

Also, mansions defy trend watchers because sellers are typically not as driven by financial need to sell. Homes often will languish, or go on and off the market for years, Naman said.

The current mansion market, with its relatively large inventory, is most likely due to foundations and nonprofits that sold out in recent years to take advantage of cheap office space rents.

"After the dot-com debacle of 2001, office space became very reasonable," Naman said. "So it was a logical progression that someone who needed 18,000 square feet of space could take something for $18 to $24 a square foot, where that space may have been $35 a square foot at the height of the dotcom market."

Naman said some mansions are being bought by developers to cut into apartments. Dominion Management is converting the Carhart Mansion at 3 East 95th Street, part of the former Lycée Français, and looking to quadruple its margins. In that home, which is nearly 100 feet wide, each of four units, the largest of which is 14,550 square feet, may go for as much as $21 million, said Carrie Chiang of The Corcoran Group.

But converting mansions may not be the biggest bang for your buck, Naman said.

"When you convert a townhouse, it isn't always that efficient, just because you're losing to public space," he said. "In a 20,000- square-foot house, you're going to lose 4,000 to 5,000 feet just from the elevator and this and that."

"And the big winding, wonderful staircases are the first thing to go," he added.

Richard Steinberg, a managing director with Warburg Realty Partnership, recently closed a deal on the 13,500-square-foot Cello Building at 53 East 77th Street, where the purchaser wants to convert it to two triplex condos. That deal is not the norm, said Steinberg, a specialist in opulent townhouses who has handled about 15 mansion properties over the past two years.

Most current sellers of mansions are owners who broke up their home into an owner unit and rental units, most foundations having sold out years ago, he said.

About 75 percent of Steinberg's mansion clients are hedge fund moguls, and the other 25 percent are generally entrepreneurs, he said.

"There's always a pocket of great new wealth that fuels the market, and the great new wealth currently is the hedge fund," he said.

< Read less

Bypass That Pesky Board, Buy a Mansion By RALPH GARDNER Jr.  At more than 20,000 square feet, the red brick Federal-style building at Fifth Avenue and 94th Street is big even by master of the universe…... Read more >

Bypass That Pesky Board,
Buy a Mansion
By RALPH GARDNER Jr.

 At more than 20,000 square feet, the red brick Federal-style building at Fifth Avenue and 94th Street is big even by master of the universe standards, which is fitting because it is owned by Bruce Kovner, a high-powered hedge fund manager and chairman of the board of the Juilliard School in Manhattan.

The property, which formerly housed the International Center of Photography, is so big "I wouldn't be surprised if there were chamber music events," said Joel Hirschtritt, a lawyer for Mr. Kovner, who bought the property in 1999 for $17.5 million and has been renovating it ever since.

Mr. Kovner, who was recently listed by Forbes magazine as having a net worth of $2 billion, isn't the only well-heeled buyer with an eye for super-size homes. In New York City's frantic real estate market, where space is considered the ultimate luxury, the latest objects of desire are mansion-size properties that range in price from $15 million to $20 million.

"As Wall Street has improved, we've been seeing a lot more large properties that are 25 foot wide and with limestone facades being transferred," said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraisal firm in New York.

Richard Steinberg, a managing director with Warburg Realty, said he has acquired 15 such properties over the last two years on behalf of developers with a view to restoring and reselling them. Compared with town houses, which are usually two or three stories and part of a contiguous row of similar dwellings, buildings considered mansions are generally more than 10,000 square feet and more than 20 feet wide.

Many of these houses were built in the late 19th or early 20th centuries as single-family homes for the city's newly rich. When the families moved on, schools, clubs and arts organizations took their places. In need of cash and eager to take advantage of soaring real estate prices, many of the institutions are selling out to new buyers, who are remodeling the properties to restore their faded grandeur and moving in with their families.

Meanwhile developers are converting some into condominiums costing as much as $21 million. The ownership changeover has caught the eye of preservationists, who worry about how it will affect neighborhoods.

Buyers in the mansion market tend to be younger families in their 30's and 40's who have made a substantial amount of money at an early age and do not want to leave Manhattan for the suburbs, brokers say.

"There's two, or three, or four, school-age children, and they need space," said Mr. Steinberg, who represents Dominion Management, an investment group that buys, restores and resells mansions. "It's pretty hard to find a 10,000-square-foot apartment, whereas it's easier to find a five-story, 10,000-square-foot house."

There are a limited number of such properties (some brokers say around 50) on the Upper East Side from the 60's to 80's. So last year, when the American Friends of Hebrew University, a nonprofit organization, sold its 14,000-square-foot building on East 69th Street, which it had occupied since 1954, two buyers were ready. A developer bought the property for $9.5 million and it was flipped the same day for $11.5 million to developers who will restore and resell the building as a single-family home, said Joanna Cutler, head of Joanna Cutler Real Estate in Manhattan.

Shelly Friedman, a lawyer in New York, said he frequently gets calls from brokers looking for mansion properties. "They'll say, 'I saw this property,' " Mr. Friedman recalled. " 'It's owned by the museum of God knows what, and the building looks antiquated and a little run down.' There's a lot of that homework going on."

Besides the room to roam, one attraction of buying a mansion-size house is privacy, both physical and financial. "A lot of these hedge fund guys want to remain anonymous," explained Mr. Steinberg, noting that these owners avoid the ordeal of sharing their financials with co-op boards.

Compared with the investment bankers who drove the real estate market in the 80's with their spending spree on duplexes and triplexes on Park Avenue, mansion buyers today "want to stay under the radar screen," Mr. Steinberg said.

Still, homeowners like Mr. Kovner are splurging on their newly acquired acreage. Mr. Kovner's lawyer, Mr. Hirschtritt, declined to say how much the renovation - expected to be completed this summer - will cost. But Peter Pennoyer, an architect in New York who specializes in classical building styles and was a consultant to Mr. Kovner, estimates the cost to be $1,000 to $2,000 a square foot, or $20 million to $40 million above the purchase price.

After 25 years as the photography center, the interior needed major work. Darkrooms and offices were gutted. A circular main hall, part of the original design by the architects Delano & Aldrich, who were famous for residential buildings with understated elegance, was removed.

Mr. Kovner, who declined to be interviewed, also cleaned up the building's facade, restored the granite-lined planters on Fifth Avenue and replaced the city's industrial cobra-head street lamps with elegant bishop's crook lights more appropriate to the landmark district.

Another mansion with a new owner and a renovation plan is the 20,000-square-foot former Town Club on East 86th Street, which was sold last February for $14.7 million to John Paulson, a money manager. The property has a swimming pool in the basement and portraits of the 12 Caesars overlooking the stairway in the main hall, according to Mr. Pennoyer, who was consulted on the renovation.

Paula Del Nunzio, the broker at Brown Harris Stevens who sold the mansion, said the family plans to keep the swimming pool. She wasn't sure about the Caesars, which have frames decorated with swags and oxen heads.

One factor influencing the mansion market is that many institutions that have occupied the buildings now want to vacate.

Peter Willner, executive vice president of the American Friends of Hebrew University, said his organization had outgrown the space.

"It was no longer a comfortable place to work," he said, so the institution has relocated downtown.

One of the former buildings occupied by the Lycée Français, a school where many New Yorkers first learned French, was vacated in 2003.

The 22-foot-wide, five-story 1920's-era building on East 73rd Street was picked up for $18 million to $19 million, according to Mr. Steinberg. Taking over the 11,250-square-foot space is a young family with two children.

While their prices are less than what some Manhattan condos in high-rises are selling for these days, the mansions often need extensive renovations. One such property, a 30-foot-wide, 17,000-square-foot building on East 70th Street, which had been divided into eight apartments, came with a cramped entrance hallway, tinted floor- to-ceiling mirrors and a kitchenette with vintage 60's green-, yellow- and orange-flowered wallpaper.

The property's developers, Simone Development Companies and Dominion Management, which paid just under $12 million for it last year, intend to recreate original details like a grand central staircase and a large dining room and sell the property as a single-family residence.

Many of these outsize properties, like the 40,000-square-foot Carhart Mansion on East 95th Street, which was the Lycée Français's Upper School, are ripe for condo conversions because of their wide street frontage; the Upper School is 100 feet wide. Its classrooms will become four condominiums, ranging in size from 6,770 square feet to 14,550 square feet. The prices: $12.5 million to $21 million each, said Carrie Chiang, a broker at the Corcoran Group who is handling the condo sales.

And over on East 65th Street the former home of Irene Silverman, a Manhattan socialite who was murdered in 1998 by mother-and-son con artists, will be transformed into two 6,000-square-foot condominiums priced in the $10 million range, according to Mr. Steinberg.

Preservationists are divided about the long-term impact of the mansion buying binge.

Samuel White, an architect who specializes in historic renovations, says the loss of institutions like schools that are "competing against a zillionaire for 20,000 square feet" will change the character of neighborhoods.

But Lo van der Valk, president of Carnegie Hill Neighbors, a preservation group on the Upper East Side, said new residents like Mr. Kovner, who are renovating their buildings, are welcome. "He's done a spectacular job and has spared no expense," Mr. van der Valk said.

< Read less

On Fifth Ave., A Penthouse Designed With Carcass-Catching Spikes! (It’s for the Birds.) Meanwhile, Dominion Snatches Up Townhouses By Michael Caledrone, February 28, 2005 Real-estate developer Dominion…... Read more >

On Fifth Ave., A Penthouse Designed With Carcass-Catching Spikes! (It’s for the Birds.) Meanwhile, Dominion Snatches Up Townhouses

By Michael Caledrone, February 28, 2005

Real-estate developer Dominion Management just added another tony property to its Upper East Side domain, purchasing a townhouse at 115 East 70th Street for $11.4 million. The 17,000-square-foot property originally listed at $15 million and was on the market for three months. It finally closed earlier this month.

The six-story Neo-Georgian townhouse—currently split into six separate units—will be converted into a luxurious, single-residence mansion. The home was originally built for I. Townsend Burden, the cousin of iron and steel magnate James Burden, and features high ceilings, original moldings, hardwood floors and intricate iron work. "It’s one of the most beautiful houses in New York," said Richard Steinberg, managing director of Warburg Realty, who represented the buyers. Cheryl Nesbit of the Corcoran Group represented the seller. In the last few years, Dominion has been busy purchasing exquisite properties to renovate extensively before reselling. Its portfolio of recent purchases includes the Henry T. Sloane House at 18 East 68th Street, a six-story mansion at 20 East 65th Street and a 50-foot Beaux-Arts townhouse at 3 East 75th.

The company’s first renovation project, at 12 East 73rd Street, was reportedly snapped up by a hedge-fund manager for close to the listing price of $18.5 million. There are still lingering disputes over some of the specifics—but Dan Kingsford, a Dominion associate, assures that they are being addressed, and the renovation should be complete in the coming months. The prewar mansion once belonged to the Lycée Français de New York, which started selling off six Upper East Side properties to raise money for a modern school. Developer Aby Rosen first bought it for $8 million, and quickly resold the building to Dominion for close to $10 million. The 11,000-square-foot, 22-foot-wide townhouse was then renovated into a five-story single-family home.

Dominion hopes to tap into a trend of restoring large townhouses close to their original design.

"There is a very good upper-end market for these special buildings," said Mr. Kingsford. For the townhouse at 115 East 70th Street, he’s looking back to the original floor plans, obtained for him by The New York Times’ "Streetscapes" columnist and architecture expert, Christopher Gray. Mr. Kingsford plans to restore the staircase that was removed in the 1930’s when the building was converted into separate apartments. Dominion will also gut the house, removing barriers that were erected to compartmentalize the townhouse for several different occupants. Mr. Kingsford expects the project to take about nine months.

< Read less

Predictions For 2005 Richard Steinberg Managing Director, Warburg Realty Partnership Where is the market now, and where is it headed? I don’t see any decrease in prices. They went up 15 to 20 percent…... Read more >

Predictions For 2005

Richard Steinberg
Managing Director, Warburg Realty Partnership

Where is the market now, and where is it headed? I don’t see any decrease in prices. They went up 15 to 20 percent this year and they will go up another 15 percent next year. The townhouse market, which to me is like oceanfront property, has a very limited supply.

Where do you see the biggest hype in this market? The new condo projects that are going up on First and Second avenues. Those prices you would have never expected to see anywhere east of Lexington. Also, TriBeCa around City Hall. It’s so commercial that families and individuals still don’t have the resources of food stores, shopping leisurely on the weekends, and its very cold and industrial and commercial.

What’s one telling statistic about the current market? The inventory has dropped almost 33 percent in the past year for very large apartments and townhouses.

< Read less

The New York Post January 31, 2004 FRENCH FANTASY The IF YOU'RE interested in the conversion of the upscale Lycee Francais school - six non-contiguous mansions on the Upper East Side - you should know…... Read more >

The New York Post
January 31, 2004

FRENCH FANTASY

The IF YOU'RE interested in the conversion of the upscale Lycee Francais school - six non-contiguous mansions on the Upper East Side - you should know the first renovated mansion has sold for more than twice its price a year ago.  The limestone house, at 12 E. 73rd St., was bought by Aby Rosen, the real estate developer, a year ago for $8 million. He then flipped the property a few months later to Dominion Financial Corp. for close to $10 million.  That company restored the 11,000-square-foot prewar to a single residence with eight bedrooms and eight baths - not to mention a rooftop terrace with a park view.  It was listed for $18.5 million, and drew such viewers as Nicole Kidman and
Robert De Niro.  Now we hear a privacy-loving hedge fund manager bought the place for $17 million. Richard Steinberg of Warburg Realty Partnership, who brokered the deal, had no comment on the sale.  Two of the more spectacular Lycee properties, a block away on 72nd Street, were sold to the Emir of Qatar for $26 million.  When those two are combined, as expected, it will be the city's largest single-family residence, measuring close to 45,000 square feet.
< Read less

From the New York Observer, June 16, 2003 The Lycée Shell Game: Aby Rosen Sells $10.9 M. Lycée Building to Developer By [author not listed] Aby Rosen, the president of residential developer…... Read more >

From the New York Observer,
June 16, 2003

The Lycée Shell Game: Aby Rosen Sells $10.9 M. Lycée Building to Developer
By [author not listed]

Aby Rosen, the president of residential developer RFR Holding, is rich enough to move properties around the Upper East Side like marbles in a game of Chinese checkers, and he's just made his latest move. The German real-estate mogul has signed a contract to sell the East 73rd Street townhouse that he bought from the Lycée Français School in January 2002.
       The buyer is a company called Dominion Financial Corporation, whose business, like Mr. Rosen's, is the development of residential properties. Dominion plans to renovate the former school building into a single-family townhouse and will then put it back on the market for about $18 million.
       "It's a beautiful building that without much work can be repositioned as a great single-family house," said a Dominion company spokesman.
       Dominion, which plans to finish the renovation in "six months, plus or minus," has already completed several renovations in the city and is currently working on several more. Notably, it refurbished two high-end lofts in Tribeca, and at 3 East 75th Street it's converting many of that apartment building's rent-stabilized units into luxury condominiums apartments.
       Dominion's newest acquisition, the former Lycée Building at 12 East 73rd Street, is a five-story, 22 ½-foot-wide building erected I 1920. It sits directly next door to Alexander and Alexandra von Furstenburg's townhouse.
       The Lycée Français bought the building in 1994 for $4.3 million and sole it to Mr. Rosen I January 2002, when it was listing for $8.5 million. Mr. Rosen said there are "tremendous" original details left o the first and second floors, including fireplaces and a wood-paneled dining room.

_____


< Read less