Wendy Madden sold the Trump Palace condo she walked away with after her divorce from shoe mogul Steve Madden — for about half what the couple paid for it a decade ago.
The sprawling 4,000-square-foot condo at 200 East 69th Street sold for $8.8 million at the end of March, records show. The buyer appears to be Michael Farkas, CEO of Blink Charging Company, according to a mortgage document that appeared in city records Thursday.
Steven and Wendy Madden (Getty)
Wendy Madden forked $9.5 million over to her ex-husband for his share of the condo in 2015, two years after the couple paid $15 million for it.
The Maddens were married for a decade. Steve, a Queens native, famously proposed from prison while serving a 31-month sentence for stock manipulation, the Observer reported. He was paid $700,000 per year as a creative consultant to the company while serving his sentence, according to the Observer. The couple wed in 2005, following his release.
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The four-bedroom, three-bathroom pad is made up of two combined units. A prior owner undertook a gut renovation and redesign led by Italian architect Russell Piccione that included the addition of a 19th century marble fireplace imported from Italy.
“It was a beautiful apartment with iconic views,” listing agent Mary Fitzgibbons of Brown Harris Stevens told The Real Deal in 2015. “The Maddens were lovely.”
Wendy was one of Steve’s first hires after he founded his eponymous footwear business in the 90s. Wendy stuck with him through his prison sentence, a saga portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s film “The Wolf of Wall Street”.
Manhattan’s luxury market has fully recovered from the pandemic, according to a market report from Compass published in February. Deals for properties priced at $10 million or above last year totaled over $6 billion, an annual growth rate of 84 percent. Rents are also rising at the high end of the market: The median monthly rent in the borough’s doorman buildings was nearly $10,000 in March, a 10 percent annual increase, according to a report by Miller Samuel.