Thor Equities sells Upper East Side townhouse after 11 years

Sold to German firm Tatar Holdings for $11M after asking $21M in 2012

Thor Equities Sells Townhouse to Tatar Holdings
Thor Equities' Joe Sitt and 60 East 66th Street (Getty, Thor Equities, Leslie Garfield, Google Maps)

Thor Equities sold an Upper East Side townhouse after 11 years of trying. 

German investment firm Tatar Holdings saved Thor from its quest to unload the property at 60 East 66th Street by buying it for $11 million through an entity called Coney Bath, LLC. A person familiar with the deal told PincusCo, which first reported the deal, that Thor retains a 1 percent stake in the property. 

It may have taken longer than Joe Sitt’s firm hoped to sell the retail townhouse, but Thor at least got a higher return than the $9.2 million it spent on the building in 2010, according to property records. The original asking price was $20.8 million when it initially hit the market in 2012. 

Leslie J. Garfield’s Matthew Lesser, the listing agent, told The Real Deal last year the 100,000-square-foot, 10-unit townhouse was finally vacant, a development the broker thought would make the property easier to sell. Despite containing rental units, the property had always been marketed primarily for its ability to be converted into a single-family mansion.

Thor last year faced challenges elsewhere in its portfolio, including losing a commercial condo in Midtown’s Row NYC Hotel, and is faced a foreclosure auction on its 1,600-key hotel in Chicago. The company’s website casts its development pipeline as worth over $20 billion and previously touted a focus on investments in logistics and life science properties. 

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Manhattan’s luxury real estate market has slowed since the Upper East Side townhouse was re-listed last year. The past few weeks have seen dramatically lower sales and prices than usual, according to weekly reports from Olshan Realty. 

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Townhouse sales dropped 30 percent year-over-year in the first half of 2023, according to a mid-year report by Leslie Garfield, a New York brokerage specializing in townhouses. Volume also fell almost 70 percent. 

But prices rose by 5 percent over that timeframe, due to a lack of inventory and buyers coming to terms with high interest rates. The brokerage predicted in the report transactions and volume will pick up through the end of the year as a result.

— Harrison Connery