New York's Cooperative and Condominium Community

Habitat Magazine Insider Guide

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MANHATTAN

Average Manhattan condo prices expected to drop in 2017 for first time in five years.

CityRealty tracks the high – and rising – prices of starchitect-designed condos.

Many co-op and condo buyers are still paying with tall piles of cash.

Co-op and median prices set records, yet again, in the second quarter.

The prices keep going up, up, up.

An old lawsuit may impact a new campaign. Mark Greenberg, founder of the New York City- and Long Island-based real-estate management firm MGRE, is running for Congress on the Republican ticket in Connecticut's 5th District, where he lives. The local Democratic committee naturally prepared opposition research — which, reports The Hartford Courant, includes information about a 1996 lawsuit alleging Greenberg waived fee-collection from some residents of The Grand Chelsea condominium, at 270 West 17th Street in Manhattan, so that they would "refrain from pursuing their rights and claims against Defendant Greenberg" and that his company "improperly used its ability to influence or control the election of individuals to the [condo's] Board to pressure … Board Members to refrain from … exercising proper supervision over defendant Greenberg's activities." The case went on for six years, ending in 2002 with a "stipulation," the newspaper said. (Full disclosure: MGRE is a Habitat advertiser.)

 

No city can have too many billionaires. So the world of high-end New York City real estate is understandably aflutter that new federal rules are scaring away buyers of super-luxe Manhattan condos.

Beginning on March 1, the U.S. Treasury Department is requiring that title companies disclose the true names of people who pay more than $3 million in cash for Manhattan condos, and more than $1 million in Miami. Such purchases were traditionally made by faceless Limited Liability Companies, or LLCs, which fed governmental fears that rich international buyers were laundering ill-gotten gains in high-dollar American real estate.

Shivers are already being felt along West 57th Street, Billionaires’ Row, according to Curbed. “Additional regulation is the last thing we need to hurt potential business that really creates jobs for American workers,” says Gary Barnett, president of Extell, a prime developer on Billionaires’ Row. “This is another layer of difficulty that is going to potentially hurt further development.”

There is good news for all those poor rich people: the federal disclosure rule runs only until August 27. Which led Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, to make a prediction: “A wealthy individual isn’t going to risk ending up on a list somewhere. They can wait six months.”

 

This time, a co-op’s shareholders decided to take the money and run. Two weeks after a Brooklyn Heights co-op turned down a developer’s $130 million offer to buy their commercial space and erect a 40-story condo tower, the residents of a co-op at 61-63 Crosby Street in Soho have sold their building for $42 million to L3 Capital, a Chicago-based investment firm that plans to turn the cast-iron jewel into an office building.

“The co-op owners decided to take some chips off the table and move out,” says Adelaide Polsinelli of Eastern Consolidated, who represented the buyer in the deal.

The 20,600-square-foot Crosby Street building, located between Spring and Broome Streets, was erected in 1876 and converted to a co-op in 1981, according to the Real Deal. It contained seven loft apartments and a ground-floor retail space most recently occupied by the clothier Carson Street. The building comes with 6,500 square feet of air rights.

An art deco gem in the Financial District of lower Manhattan has become the latest to join a growing trend: former bank buildings that are being converted into luxury condominiums.

The conversion plan for One Wall Street, a 50-story icon designed in 1931 by Ralph Walker as headquarters for the Irving Trust Co., has won the approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), YIMBY reports. Macklowe Properties, which bought the building from Bank of New York Mellon in 2014 for $585 million, plans to turn the landmarked structure and adjacent annex into 524 apartments, with two commercial spaces on the ground floor, one of which will occupy the famed Red Room. The plans, prepared by the architects Robert A.M. Stern and SLCE Architects, do not specify what will become of the four-story observation room on top of the building.

Stern told the LPC he is excited to bring the building “back to glory.”

 

In-house spa? Rooftop terrace? Parking garage? Bike storage? Gym? Those amenities are strictly 2015. At least 1 percent of Manhattan townhouses now have a “safe room,” and this amenity’s popularity is accelerating along with soaring property values, Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, tells AM New York. They’re starting to crop up in Brooklyn.

A safe room – a Kevlar- and steel-fortified redoubt inside an apartment that’s impervious to dirty bombs, terrorist attacks or rioting by the unhappy 99 percent – is starting to become “a part of the suite of amenities that makes a property part of the upper end of the market,” Miller says.

Safe rooms began to appear after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the concept was spread by the hit 2002 Hollywood movie “Panic Room.” The Occupy Wall Street movement and the stalking of such celebrities as Madonna, David Letterman and Gwyneth Paltrow have continued to feed the anxieties of the rich and famous. Though such a haven costs upwards of $500,000 to build – the door can weigh up to three tons – one highrise unit owned by a Saudi prince in the Heritage at Trump Place on Riverside Drive has three safe rooms.

What are the ultra-rich so worried about?

“They’re thinking of ‘what ifs,’” says Tom Gaffney, CEO of Gaffco Ballistics, a Vermont-based company that installs safe rooms. “The more you have, the more you have to keep safe.”

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