Toning down luxe pitches

From the January issue: When the Park Columbus first came on the market a year ago, the marketing team introduced the building with a campaign that emphasized the conversion’s luxury, its high-end finishes and its amenities. “It was the amenities-driven campaign you saw all over Manhattan over the past four years,” says Hunter Frick, project manager at Halstead Property Development Marketing, which handled the marketing of Park Columbus, located at 101 West 87th Street. “We stressed the children’s playroom, the attended lobby, the limestone bathrooms, the Sub-Zeros.” But what was the perfect pitch in early 2008’s real estate market now seems inappropriate. Over the course of one year of tumultuous financial events (a mortgage crisis, bank bailouts and volatile exchange rates) buyers have gone from “more is more” to being wary of ostentation.