A Park Slope development site where Baruch Singer once planned to build an 11-story condominium has changed hands for $6.5 million, according to Brownstoner. The three-parcel site, at 385 Fourth Avenue and 6th Street, had been listed by CPEX for $7.75 million. Preliminary plans are already in place for a 52-unit, Enrique Norten-designed building with 10 parking spots, but the Department of Buildings also recently issued a stop-work order on the site. The buyer’s identity is shielded behind 278 6th Street LLC, with an address at 26 Delevan Street in Brooklyn, public records show. [Brownstoner]

If at first you don’t succeed, try flying to China. After boosting its price to $34 million from $25 million in June this year, the brokers behind One York’s penthouse apartment are hitting the road to find buyers. The Tribeca condo building, designed by famed architect Enrique Norten, is cropping up in the South China Morning Post, which reported that the building’s brokers have already spent time in Shanghai and Beijing searching for potential takers.

In a bid to attract more foreign buyers, the developer of Midtown condominium-hotel Cassa has hired brokerage Prodigy International to handle sales, replacing new development firm the Marketing Directors. Developer Solly Assa, a head of Assa Properties, told The Real Deal today that Prodigy is now the exclusive marketing and sales agent for the 48-story glass tower, located at 70 West 45th Street. “We’re targeting more of an international client,” he said. “Prodigy is really catering to international consumers.” Assa said that the Marketing Directors sold nearly 40 percent of the project’s 57 condo units since sales began in June. The building was designed by Cetra/Ruddy and TEN Arquitectos, the Mexico City firm headed by Enrique Norten. When completed this spring, it will house 166 hotel rooms operated by Desires Hotels. [more]

From the October issue: When the buyer of a new development condo on the Upper West Side broke
his sales contract last spring, he didn’t regret forfeiting the
$250,000 deposit. By his estimate, the $2.5 million condo had lost far
more of its value — some $800,000 — since he agreed to purchase it. “He thought, ‘I’m losing less money walking away from my contract
deposit. I’m not going to throw good money after bad,’” said Steven
Sladkus, a partner at law firm Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman &
Herz, and the buyer’s attorney. So Sladkus was surprised to get a call from the buyer a few weeks ago
asking if the sponsor would sell him the unit after all — for the
right price.

This past week, Mexican starchitect Enrique Norten and his firm TEN Arquitectos announced that he had designed no fewer than four new projects for New York City.

That is surely interesting and would be even more exciting were it not for the fact that Norten’s noble and elaborate plans for buildings in the Big Apple have a strange, meandering way of coming up empty and then fizzling out.

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