Here’s a rental listing like no other: a 25-foot-wide, five-story mansion with a marble façde at 20 East 64th Street is available for rent at only $90,000 a month on one of the most sought after blocks of the Upper East Side.
It’s not as crazy at it sounds on first blush, at least if you agree with the broker’s sales pitch.
What can you get for $90,000 a month? Five floors, 17 rooms, 11 bathrooms, an elevator, a kitchen in the basement with staff rooms, plus a kitchenette, massage room, workout room and office on the ground floor.
The 10,000-square-foot mansion, built around 1920 with 15-foot ceilings in many rooms, was purchased a few months back by Irish investor Derek Quinlan from investment banker Robert de Guardiola for $28 million.
But since Quinlan won’t be able to come stateside for the foreseeable future, he is renting the place, said Cheryl Tanenbaum, who represented Quinlan in the purchase and is now the rental broker for the property, which has been on the market since at least April.
The price might actually not be completely insane if you do the math. Rent works out to $108 per square foot a year, which is about the same price you’d pay for space in a top office building in the city, say at the General Motors Building or the new Bank of America tower going up next to Bryant Park.
Slicing the numbers a different way, monthly rent works out to about $5,300 per room, which is only maybe double or triple the price of a Manhattan studio of comparable size, making rent seem perhaps more palatable and comprehensible to those less-well-heeled denizens of studio apartments.
Tanenbaum pointed out that the rental would also make sense for long-term visitors to the city, who sometimes pay more than $90,000 a month for their hotel stays. “Recently, just a regular two-bedroom suite at the Four Seasons is $5,000 a night,” she said. “But when you break down [the rent for the townhouse], it’s only $3,000 a day.”
Even though a renter would arguably be throwing money down the drain by renting rather than buying, the rental costs half the price it would cost to own, which makes it an unusual situation, Tanenbaum said.
“You are really paying the cost of a mortgage of a $15 million property,” she said. “For the same monthly expenditure as a $15 million property you get a much grander space, debt free.
“Not counting real estate taxes, the mortgage would be probably at least $150,000 a month,” Tanenbaum added, “so if you have $10 or $20 or $30 million you can invest it elsewhere or use it in your business.”
Another bonus is that if the renter is in the city for the next few years, they don’t have to worry about the real estate market declining, she said.
“When they want to be out they can be out,” Tanenbaum said. “They don’t have to wait and see what happens.”
Tanenbaum also said the rental could be a good fit for a company that needs to house an executive, since it becomes a tax deduction and a cost to the company. Or it could work for a movie executive or lead actor with a family, who can still have an assistant, trainer and bodyguard live in the building and have their own private space. The renter would also be able to count Edgar Bronfman Jr. and Ivana Trump as neighbors.
There are downsides, however.
The home comes with no furniture, which would mean a lot of trips to Ikea to fill the space up. If you feel like shelling out presumably tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars more, Tanenbaum said arrangements can be made to get it furnished.