Wealthy Buyers Favoring Downtown Condos Over White-Glove Co-ops

There was a time, not so long ago, when the gold standard of New York City apartments was a postwar, white-glove co-op on Park Avenue or somewhere with a view of Central Park. Those days are all but gone.

Today's wealthy buyers are opting for newly constructed or renovated condos in trendier downtown neighborhoods. Along with a smorgasbord of amenities, those buildings come with fewer restrictions than old-line uptown co-ops, where powerful co-op boards exert control over admissions, sublets, renovations, pets and a host of other factors. 

"In my generation and in the one immediately after me, most of those people still cared about addresses," Frederick Warburg Peters, president emeritus of real estate firm Coldwell Banker Warburg, tells The Wall Street Journal. "The next generation of buyers — the ones with money — mostly have it through tech and hedge funds. The majority of them don't particularly want to live uptown."

John Walkup, the co-founder of real estate market insight company UrbanDigs, has also noticed the change. "It's no longer, 'I have to be on Sutton Place in a prewar co-op and belong to the Met Opera,'" Walkup says. "It's, 'I live in this 32nd-floor Tribeca penthouse with a sweeping view of the harbor.'"

Another factor in the changing tastes is the age of many uptown co-ops. "They're family heirlooms, in many cases," says luxury real-estate agent Leighton Candler of the Corcoran Group. "People hold on to these for 30 years. So even if they look absolutely beautiful, they generally have not had a renovation in a while."

In addition to being strictly regulated by co-op boards, such renovations are costly and time-consuming, adding to the drag on the appeal of old-line co-ops. It has all resulted in some sharp price cuts.

Real estate investor Edward Minskoff listed his luxury Park Avenue co-op apartment for $17.7 million in 2022. But by the time he sold it in January 2024, the closing price for the property with sweeping views of Central Park was just $7.4 million — a reduction of almost 60%.

When there's pain for sellers like Minskoff, there's pure pleasure for buyers like private-equity executive James Coulter, who, with his wife Phyllis, paid $36 million for a five-bedroom unit at 2 E. 67th St., which was initially listed for $49 million in May 2022.

These are not fads. Fifth and Park Avenue condos valued over $10 million saw their median sale price increase by 45% over the past 10 years, according to UrbanDigs. Meanwhile, the median sale price of co-ops on the same avenues grew by just 16% over the same time period.