It’s been more than seven months since reports of the $88 million sale of Sanford Weill’s 15 Central Park West penthouse emerged, yet, in light of the recent $90 million-plus contract on a One57 penthouse and Steve Wynn’s $70 million purchase at the Ritz-Carlton, it continues to reverberate through the city’s real estate market. Brokers told the New York Times that they expect a slew of high-priced homes, including a handful asking more than $90 million, to hit the market in the near future.
“A lot of high-end buyers and sellers want to get on the gilded bandwagon,” Core CEO Shaun Osher told the Times. Sellers figure that with much of the globe mired in financial troubles, the world’s wealthiest are looking for investments in high-end cities, like New York.
But for the brokers listing these properties, setting an asking price can prove difficult. They factor in building qualities, views, ceiling heights, finishes, layout, and outdoor space. However, it’s still largely based on emotion, not ration.
As appraiser Jonathan Miller told the Times, sellers “take the highest sale [they] can find and apply some methodology in a very subjective way to talk [themselves] up to this bigger number.”
Though there are more billionaires in the world than trophy apartments, Prudential Douglas Elliman Chairman Howard Lorber said brokers must remind sellers who look to billionaires to pay above-market prices that those prospective buyers didn’t make their money by overestimating markets. [NYT]