Billionaire Robert Bass has purchased an apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue for $34 million, the New York Observer reported.
The founder of Oak Hill Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, purchased the 12th floor apartment from Damon Mezzacappa, a financier.
The elite co-op, just opposite the Central Park Zoo, at East 64th Street, has been home to Rupert Murdoch, Charles Schwab and the late, doomed heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, Casey Johnson. [more]
News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng, have reportedly sold their 10,000-square-foot mansion in Oyster Bay after a $5.7 million price cut. Gawker reported the final sale price was $9.1 million.
Originally listed for $14.8 million, the 11-bedroom, seven-and-a-half bathroom home with a 950-square-foot guest house on a 4.6-acre lot was on the market for $9.995 million with Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty. [Gawker] [more]
The Real Deal interviewed Mort Zuckerman for what it thought was The Closing section of the September magazine, a wide-ranging monthly Q & A piece with some of New York real estate industry’s top players.
But Zuckerman, the chairman of Boston Properties and publisher of the New York Daily News, might not have been thoroughly briefed on the personal nature of The Closing interview, which generally includes questions ranging from where people maintain homes to who they are dating to mistakes they’ve made in their careers. When The Real Deal asked about the size of his apartment, one of the tamer questions slated for him, the 74-year-old billionaire said he didn’t “have any idea” about the square footage, called the question “silly” and terminated the interview.
The Real Deal decided to share a slightly condensed version of the Q & A with the divorced father of two on the Web. Check here to see what Zuckerman had to say. [more]
From the April issue: The 44-story tower at 1211 Sixth Avenue, home to Rupert Murdoch’s global media company News Corporation, is getting a major new tenant. Axis Re, a division of Axis Capital, the large Bermuda-based reinsurance company, signed a lease to move to 121,019 square feet on floors 24 through 26, data from CoStar Group shows. The asking rent for the three floors at the 1.8 million-square-foot tower, which is located between 47th and 48th streets, was $65 per square foot, leasing data website MrOfficeSpace.com shows. That price was a bit above the overall asking rent in Midtown, which in February was $57.97 per square foot, CBRE figures show. Click here to see the commercial market report in the April issue for more on the latest office trends.
The Upper East Side’s Muppets Mansion, so-called because of its former use as the creative headquarters for Kemit the Frog and Miss Piggy mastermind Jim Henson, has been sold at a 16 percent discount after just one month on the market, according to the Observer. The 40-foot-wide townhouse, at 117-119 East 69th Street, belonged to Warner Music Group head Edgar Bronfman, who in 2008 paid $28.5 million for the property, gutted it, and planned to renovate, but moved to London instead and never followed through with the plans. [more]
Despite racy comments about a rumored New York Times buyer and a plug
for Boston Properties Chairman and CEO Mortimer Zuckerman for U.S. Senate,
Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman and CEO, got his best response
from the audience at a Real Estate Board of New York luncheon today
when he called for a push-back against New York’s powerful public
unions. The
audience of hundreds of real estate professionals in the Sheraton New
York Hotel in Midtown broke into applause when Murdoch mentioned that
the business community should challenge the powerful unions in Albany
such as those representing teachers. “Who owns and controls
Albany? It is the state employees unions,” he said. “Until business
raises more funds that won’t be turned around,” he said to applause. [more]
The 141 Prince Street co-op belonging to fashion designer Elie Tahari and his wife, Rory, is quietly on the market and could go for more than $22 million, sources told the Post. Tahari purchased the spot from media mogul Rupert Murdoch for $24.68 million in 2005. The four-story, 9,600-square-foot loft has three main bedrooms, three guest rooms, seven bathrooms, a screening room and an all-glass “sky room” that Elie uses as a yoga studio. The Soho building is a former chocolate factory, and is the second New York apartment the couple has put on the market in recent months. Rory sold her two-bedroom, 72 Mercer Street apartment earlier this month for $3.2 million and a representative for the family said she is looking for opportunities to invest. [Post]
The 19th-century brick
house at 11 Spring Street, nicknamed the Candle Building, is now on the
market for $26 million, down from its original price of $39.8 million.
Real estate heiress Caroline Cummings listed the 12,000-square-foot
building with the Corcoran Group’s Robert Brown in September, after
buying it from one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons for $12 million. In
November, Browne was replaced by Core Group, and the price fell to
$36.5 million, and then again to $29.5 million. The home is now listed
with Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Leonard Steinberg for $26 million.
 |
Laurie Tisch and Rupert Murdoch are about to be neighbors. Tisch, the philanthropist
daughter of the late Loews Corp. co-owner Preston Robert Tisch, bought a
13-room co-op at 834 Fifth Avenue for $29 million. Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., lives in a
penthouse in the building, which is between 64th and 65th streets.
The seller is the
estate of Araxia Buckhantz, who died last year at age 101. Buckhantz is
the cousin of oil magnate Nubar Gulbenkian. Brown Harris Stevens had the listing.
