For developers, while there can be challenges to designing and marketing a penthouse, it can be very lucrative at the top.
“Very often penthouses are the kicker that makes a building really profitable,” said architect Bice Wilson, principal of Meridian Design Associates, who notes that the return on investment in a penthouse can be higher than on any other unit in the building.
Wilson has worked on a number of projects with penthouses including the Prime, a new condominium building located on 14th Street between 8th and 9th avenues. In addition to nine units starting at $3 million, including eight lofts and a ground-floor duplex, the Prime has a $9.5 million penthouse with attached outdoor space.
While it’s the views (and cachet) derived from being at the top that allow developers to get a hefty price for penthouses, when units should be marketed to garner maximum returns differs from project to project. While penthouses are typically larger than other units in a building, they aren’t always that much more expensive to build. There can be more glass involved than in units on lower floors, to take advantage of penthouse views, and sometimes developers will add additional amenities such as wine chillers, but on a per-square-foot basis, overall construction costs aren’t that much greater in the penthouse than in other units.
“Other than certain amenities — a bigger range or refrigerator — on a dollar-for-dollar basis it costs the same to build a penthouse as it does to build [a unit] on the third or fourth floor,” said Daren Hornig, the developer of the Prime. Some developers say they don’t even break out the cost of constructing the penthouses.
Brokers differ on when these units should hit the market.
“We have six penthouses, and we put some on the market at the same time as the other units,” said broker Michael Chapman of Stribling & Associates, who is handling marketing for the Hit Factory Condominiums at 421 West 54th Street, a conversion of the building where artists such as Madonna, John Lennon, Jay-Z and Paul Simon recorded, and Thorndale Condominiums, a 21-unit conversion of a warehouse at 406 West 45th Street that was once a horse stable. “A lot of times penthouses are marketed later because they are an addition to the building and are not built until a later stage,” he added.
Both the Hit Factory and Thorndale are located in Manhattan’s Clinton Historic District, where tough zoning restrictions prohibit building additional space on top of units above a certain height. For the Hit Factory this wasn’t an issue: The duplex penthouse units were created from a recording studio with a 28-foot ceiling that was built to accommodate a 164-piece orchestra.
“What we did with this design was take advantage of that space,” said Scott Turkington, a principal at HF Sponsor Corp., which is developing the Hit Factory, where the four larger penthouses (ranging from 2,500 square feet to 3,600 square feet) are in the $2.25 million range.
“We were able to drop another floor into that space,” Turkington said.
Wilson notes that the complexities of working at the top of a building can make shaping a penthouse more fun. “It’s more sculptural and it’s a different type of space,” he said. “The return on investment is going to justify the attention and it’s fun getting it right and getting it ready for the person who wants to buy.”
For the Thorndale condos, zoning requirements meant taking time to build penthouses with 10-foot ceilings — lower than other units in the building, which have 11- to 14-foot ceilings. The building’s two penthouses — both two-bedroom, two-bath units with terraces — are expected to list from $1.5 million to $1.7 million.
Units on lower floors, which include one-bedrooms, one-bedrooms with a den and two-bedrooms, will range from about $600,000 to $1.3 million.
Thorndale developer Jon Greenberg, a former investment banker who is principal at Gramercy Property Group, says he and his partner Tom Iovane will probably put one unit on the market first and see what transpires.
“We’ll probably put one on before the other — and hold off until the end to see where the market is,” Greenberg said. “You don’t want to overprice or underprice in this market.”
That’s exactly what the developer of Bradhurst Carriage House decided to do. Generally the expectation is that with more units in contract, a developer will be able to eke out a higher price, which can mean a lot for prime units, said Jorden Tepper, managing director of Manhattan Apartments and Manhattan Lofts, who is currently marketing the Bradhurst Carriage House, an eight-unit loft condominium at 458 West 146th Street.
“This particular developer opted to leave one penthouse for the later phases of marketing,” Tepper said. “There’s no calculation. It really depends. There are really no rules other than what the developer’s expectations are.”
Still, others say holding out for a higher price isn’t always the best plan.
“If I have people who want to buy a property, I feel we take the money, be happy and move on to the next project,” said Hornig. “My feeling is you can’t be greedy in any market.”
Just as there are different schools of thought on when a penthouse should be marketed, there are different methods as to how. “As marketers, we have to sell the potential of the space — not simply the way it is designed, but the way you really live in it on a daily basis,” said Michael Shvo, principal of the Shvo Group, who is currently marketing a 1,772-square-foot penthouse at Fultonhaus, a 14-story loft building at 119 Fulton Street. A different project being marketed by Shvo at 20 Pine Street features penthouses of around 2,000 square feet, small by most standards.
Yet that preempts one marketing problem: Brokers say that penthouses often start off too large and have to be divided up later into smaller units if they don’t sell.
“Marketing penthouses is always a unique process,” Shvo said, “but is impacted by six key factors: the address, the building and the unit’s design, the views, the number of penthouse units and if there is outdoor space or not.”