Who bought the priciest pads in Manhattan last month?

Buyers included Estée Lauder heiress and LLCs linked to execs, foreigners

220 Central Park South and 960 Fifth Avenue with Aerin Lauder (Credit: Getty Images, Warburg Realty)
220 Central Park South and 960 Fifth Avenue with Aerin Lauder (Credit: Getty Images, Warburg Realty)

A billionaire heiress and four mysterious LLCs were the buyers of the most expensive homes sold in November.

The properties they snapped up included four condos at Vornado Realty Trust’s 220 Central Park South and one Fifth Avenue co-op. The five sales totaled more than $243 million. Here’s a look at last month’s biggest home sales.

1. 220 Central Park South, #49A
The 6,500-square-foot unit sold for $64.1 million to K&J Assets, an entity tied through mortgage documents to a housing complex in Hong Kong. The unidentified buyers took out a $37.8 million mortgage on the five-bedroom pad.

2. 220 Central Park South, #46A
Another five-bedroom condo sold for $59.6 million to an LLC which has the address of a St. Petersburg, Fla., home owned by interior designer Janine Arnold and attorney Frederick Arnold, the former chief financial officer of brokerage Convergex, now owned by Cowen Group.

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3. 960 Fifth Avenue, #10A
Aerin Lauder, the billionaire heiress and style and image director of Estée Lauder, snapped up this $47 million co-op in Lenox Hill. The five-bedroom apartment hadn’t traded for 70 years. It was previously owned by the late C. Douglas Dillon, who was treasury secretary in the Kennedy administration.

4. 220 Central Park South, V-14
This 4,300-square-foot villa sold for $46.5 million to an unidentified buyer who used an LLC. The one-bedroom duplex is directly underneath Sting’s nearly $66 million triplex.

5. 220 Central Park South, #54B
This three-bedroom condo closed for $26.2 million to an LLC buyer with a sole manager identified as Ning Zhao, whose listed address tracks back to a mansion in Princeton that Zhao and Li Ge bought for $8.3 million in 2018, according to public records. A couple by the same name was honored last year for donating about $14 million to Peking University in China.

Write to Erin Hudson at ekh@therealdeal.com