24 December 2004
New York City media is crowing about the most expensive apartments for sale in the city, ranging in price from $44 to $70 million. The $44 million is for triplex penthouse formerly owned by Laurence Rockefeller located at 834 5th Avenue, reportedly bought recently by Rupert Murdoch. The $70 million is for a triplex penthouse atop the Pierre Hotel at 5th Avenue and East 61st Street, on the market. The administrator of Cryptome has done architectural work on both.
We offer plans of the two mansions, for free in PDF, and in AutoCAD for a fee to architects and others.
PDFs Zipped:
834 5th Avenue Penthouse (1.4MB)
Pierre Hotel Penthouse (1.6MB)
For information on purchase of the complete AutoCAD files, email jya@pipeline.com
More on our architectural firm (which underwrites Cryptome): http://natsios-young.com
New York Times, December 24, 2004
EDITORIAL
Does That Include the Curtains?
For anyone looking for an easy way to measure the distance between the big city and the American heartland, there is the new highest-end price for a New York apartment: $44 million. For good measure, the co-op building requires payment in cash, which gets around the sticky problem of finding a mortgage that jumbo.
Luckily, that seems to have been no impediment for the reported buyer, the media mogul and billionaire Rupert Murdoch. For his money, Mr. Murdoch gets a Fifth Avenue penthouse triplex that has 20 rooms and 8,000 square feet, not counting the terrace overlooking Central Park. (For those with much more modest needs and means, the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan goes for a mere $1 million, without the view.)
For New Yorkers, this sort of news creates a swelling sense of pride and despair. For the rest of the nation, it calls forth a single question: Can you imagine what that kind of money would buy here?
If the daydreamer happened to live in Muncie, Ind., the subject of a study on middle America 75 years ago, the answer is: quite a bit. Mr. Murdoch could have bankrolled the whole city budget for 2005 - $36 million - with enough left over to buy several homes. A big house with a front yard and a backyard can be had in Muncie for under $150,000. And that needn't be paid off up front.
New York Times, December 23, 2004
No Price Too High for a Lap of Luxury
In a city where the price of luxury seems to march inexorably upward, wealthy
apartment buyers are showing they are just as prone to the herd mentality
as mere mortals rushing to buy the same
Last week the media billionaire Rupert Murdoch agreed to pay $44 million
for a co-op on Fifth Avenue. It turns out that sale was no fluke. From Manhattan
to Woodside, Calif., the market for multimillion-dollar properties is
increasingly buoyant.
In October, Ronald O. Perelman, the Revlon chairman, sold his Mediterranean-style
house on seven acres in Palm Beach for $70 million. That same month, a 16-room
triplex penthouse at the Pierre hotel in New York went on the market, also
for $70 million.
In Manhattan the number of sales of condos or co-ops at $5 million or more
rose to 163 in 2004, a record number, said Jonathan Miller, president of
Miller Samuel, a New York real estate appraiser. Brokers say that since
Thanksgiving apartments selling for more than $10 million have ignited bidding
wars and frantic showings.
"It's a peculiar behavior," said Kirk Henckels, the director of Stribling
Private Brokerage in Manhattan. "It's as if they all go to the same cocktail
party and say `Are we going to shop tomorrow?' "
Because the stock market has been more volatile than real estate in recent
years, "people feel more comfortable than ever before having a higher percentage
of their portfolio than ever before in their home," said Hall F. Willkie,
president of the real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens in Manhattan.
According to a survey by Capgemini, a consulting company, and Merrill Lynch,
high net worth individuals — those with assets of $1 million or more
— put 17 percent of their portfolios in real estate in 2003, up from
15 percent in 2002.
Louise Sunshine, president of the Sunshine Group, a luxury condominium marketing
company, said she was locked to the phone all of Sunday, negotiating with
three bidders vying for a penthouse condominium atop the new Bloomberg Tower
on 58th Street with an asking price of $26 million.
While low interest rates have kept the market for one- and two-bedroom apartments
humming for four years, the highest reaches of New York's rarefied real estate
market softened after the Sept. 11 attacks, the dot-com bust and a string
of accounting scandals that sent the stock market spiraling.
At a time of relentless speculation over whether a bubble in real estate
prices could be ready to pop, the wealthiest buyers are shopping for living
space again, lured by the general pattern of rising sales prices over the
last four years.
Pamela Liebman, chief executive of the Corcoran Group, the New York real
estate company, said more than 20 people had asked to see a $30 million six-story
town house on 64th Street near Fifth Avenue. "Normally we would get half
that," she said. "In my 20 years in the business, I've never seen as many
qualified buyers for $20 million apartments as I'm seeing now."
Michele Kleier, a co-president of Gumley Haft Kleier, a real estate brokerage
firm in New York, said what many people are thinking: "There seem to be more
and more rich people. Where are they all coming from?" Successful hedge fund
managers, bankers who expect huge Wall Street bonuses and Europeans capitalizing
on the weak dollar, other brokers say.
The revived market seems to have motivated the seller of the penthouse at
the Pierre. The apartment features a living room, once a ballroom, with 23-foot
ceilings; five wood-burning fireplaces; and four corner terraces. Oh, and
did someone mention monthly maintenance fees of $47,767?
In the Hamptons, said Diane Saatchi, a broker in the East Hampton, N.Y.,
office of Corcoran, buyers snapped up 37 homes priced at $5 million or above
through October, compared with 29 during all of last year.
In Northern California, where the bursting of the tech bubble in early 2000
humbled the real estate market, high rollers are back. "A lot of people who
were sitting on the sidelines after 2000 now have the confidence to buy in
that price range," said Avram Goldman, president of Coldwell Banker San Francisco
Bay Area. He pointed to the initial public offering at Google this fall,
a bonanza for about 1,000 employees who are now millionaires. In just the
last month, Mr. Goldman said, two homes sold in Woodside, south of San Francisco,
for close to $10 million each. "We haven't seen a lot of those sales in a
while," he noted.