Cali private equity billionaire makes Downtown’s priciest buy at the Getty: sources

Three-story Peter Marino-designed pad sells for $59M

The Getty at 501 West 24th Street, Moshe Shuster, Peter Marino and Michael Shvo (Credit: Victor Group, Getty Images and Wikimedia Commons)
The Getty at 501 West 24th Street, Moshe Shuster, Peter Marino and Michael Shvo (Credit: Victor Group, Getty Images and Wikimedia Commons)

A billionaire who runs a California-based private equity shop has paid $59 million for a three-floor pad atop the Getty, sources familiar with the project told The Real Deal. The sale is the priciest closed Manhattan deal in Downtown to date.

The buyer, whom sources familiar with the deal declined to identify by name, paid just shy of $6,000 a foot for the 10,000-square-foot spread, which spans the top three floors of the 12-story High Line-hugging project. It boasts 2,700 square feet of outdoor space with a private pool, as well as a full-floor master bedroom, an additional master bedroom, seven bathrooms with bespoke stone and marble, and two great rooms, one of which sports 22-foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows. The pad was designed by Peter Marino, the starchitect who also designed the project. The top two floors were asking $50 million, or over $7,700 a foot, according to an offering plan from September 2016.

The Getty, co-developed by Victor Group and Michael Shvo, has a projected total sellout of $146.5 million and is the priciest boutique new development to hit the West Side. It was approved by the New York Attorney General in September 2016 and attracted an elite set of art-loving business barons.

Sources familiar with the project said the buyer of the $59 million spread is a close friend of Shvo, who is a prominent art collector in his own right and owns works from Andy Warhol, Francois-Xavier Lalanne and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Shvo, who settled a tax evasion case relating to that very collection on Thursday, couldn’t be reached for comment. Representatives for Victor Group declined to comment on the buyer. Douglas Elliman’s Tal and Oren Alexander handle sales for the project along with Adam Modlin of the Modlin Group. The brokers declined to comment. Forbes reported news of the sale earlier Friday, but did not have information on the buyer.

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Blackstone Group vice chair J. Tomilson Hill bought the third and fourth floors for his private art museum, and the Lehmann Maupin gallery will occupy the ground floor. The project never officially launched sales, sources familiar with it said, with the development team and their brokers opting instead to tap their own network of buyers. Four floors remain up for grabs, with prices starting at $16 million. Each floor has a different layout, with some having double-height ceilings and others, sunken living rooms.

The new deal at the Getty breaks a record held by the Walker Tower, a JDS Development Group and Property Markets Group project where the penthouse sold for $51 million in 2014. On a per-foot basis however, that pad, which was bought by Hakkasan boss Neil Moffitt, was pricier, trading for about $8,500 a foot.

Earlier this month, a five-bedroom penthouse at celebrity hotspot 443 Greenwich Street asking $58 million went into contract.