New PR strategies bring pricey properties to market with a bang

The city’s top brokers are getting down and dirty with the real estate press, increasingly employing aggressive marketing strategies to get pricey properties on the front covers of publications seen all over the world, the New York Observer reported.

Sanford Weill, the seller of the 10-room penthouse at 15 Central Park West that garnered $88 million last year, reached out to the Wall Street Journal, which wrote a story about the apartment a month before a fertilizer billionaire paid the full asking price for the unit. Christopher Jeffries’ and Howard Marks’ apartments at the Ritz have also been featured in the press. These buyers might previously have kept their listings quiet, making only selective calls to friends and business acquaintances.

The new desire for press attention may be due to the birth of luxury new development condos, which have ousted traditional co-op residences as the city’s most exclusive property type, particularly in the eyes of foreign buyers. Co-ops have typically been more selective about buyers, prompting brokers to stick to their own moneyed networks to find suitable purchasers. The spread of the internet has also led to transparency. If journalists are going to find listing information on websites like Streeteasy.com, it may be in a seller’s best interests to control the messaging before word gets out, the Observer noted.

“The old guard did their business from their Rolodexes. But no one today really knows everyone with money, no one knows everything,” said Fredrik Eklund, a broker at Prudential Douglas Elliman. [NYO] – Katherine Clarke