For 1,651 days, a Georgian-style townhouse on a stately Upper East Side block waited for a buyer. The 10,021-square-foot listing was passed from one brokerage firm to another, and another.
Finally, last week, 15 East 90th Street went into contract for $16.5 million. It was the highest-priced luxury signing of the week, according to the latest Olshan market report.
The property was one of 19 above $4 million to go into contract in that period. (Last year the same time period had 18 such deals.) The second priciest signing was a co-op apartment at 1060 Fifth Avenue, with an asking price of $15.75 million.
The Fifth Avenue unit — a stone’s throw from the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir — has five bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms and views of Central Park. A gym inside the building features a swimming pool and a golf simulator.
The median asking price across all 19 properties was $5.7 million.
The first-placed townhouse, which had an initial asking price of $35 million, was one of three townhouses to go into contract last week. Their average asking price was $13.6 million.
Donna Olshan, whose firm puts out the reports, said 15 East 90th Street — one of two properties on the list that had been on the market for long stretches — skewed the “negotiability” figure that the firm calculates to reflect the percentage difference between the original asking price and the final asking price.
“It basically underscores that the market is not going to respond until it sees a price that is considered very good value,” Olshan said.
A block away, at 60 East 9oth Street, another townhouse that was being shopped off market by Brown Harris Stevens’ John Burger was pulled from the market last week after the Wall Street Journal published that it was for sale. In a story today, The Real Deal explained the snafu.