You can’t miss them. Billboards — big, broad, gleaming expanses of advertisement touting seemingly every swanky new residential project throughout Manhattan. The billboards might cost developers into six figures, but that’s chump change compared to the sales interest they might draw.
“In my 20 years of experience, billboards have been the single greatest source for [sales] traffic,” William Zeckendorf, a co-partner in Zeckendorf Development, told The Real Deal.
Zeckendorf is developing the ultra-luxury 15 Central Park West condominiums, the first fresh residential construction along the park in more than a generation. Part of its marketing includes a bright billboard splashed along 200 feet of both Broadway and Central Park West, turning corners onto 61st and 62nd streets.
Sales prices at 15 Central Park West have already turned enough heads to cause collective neck injury to the New York City real estate community. For instance, a hedge fund mogul bought a condo there late last year for a reported $45 million — an all-time condo sales record for the city — and all units are expected to go for thousands a square foot. The “six figures” that Zeckendorf said he estimates was spent for the billboard and its upkeep, then, could be covered theoretically by one small unit’s sale.
Not all billboards are literally boards — nor are they necessarily at the projects they market. Fifteen Central Park West’s is both: It’s fabric stretched over wood at the construction site. But, for 555 West 23rd Street, Douglaston Development had the fabric of a billboard stretched down the side of a building at 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue. It not only screams the project’s name to the masses in Chelsea, but also instructs — “River views four blocks west” — which, in the end, might be the most cost-effective thing a billboard can do.