Fifth Avenue Co-op Sells for $54M, $16M Off

One of the East Side’s vaunted co-ops has added a new resident.

Unit 12 at 960 Fifth Avenue traded hands for $53.5 million on Tuesday, according to public records. The sale for the prewar unit, which hit the market in May 2023 for $70 million, also included two staff rooms on the third floor of the property that also uses the address 3 East 77th Street.

The apartment has eight bedrooms and seven bathrooms, five wood-burning fireplaces and 11- to 13-foot ceilings. The 10 windows in the 12th-floor home face Fifth Avenue with views of Central Park.

The buyer is hidden in a trust, part of an increasingly accepted convention of buyer anonymity from the notoriously nosy properties.

The seller is the estate of former oil heiress Anne Hendricks Bass, who died in 2020.

The Rosario Candela-designed building comes with a private restaurant, in-house chef, rooftop fitness center and rooftop terrace.

The original listing price would have put the apartment in the rarified $70 million bucket of co-op sales.

One of the penthouse units at the Lenox Hill building broke the record for the most expensive co-op ever sold when it went for $70 million to Nassef Sawiris, Egypt’s richest man, in 2014. That record stood for just three months before a duplex at 740 Park Avenue sold for $71.3 million to billionaire Israel “Izzy” Englander.

As it stands, the sale of Unit 12 is the most expensive co-op sale so far this (barely two-week-old) year. The 30 percent discount from listing to closed price is emblematic of the state of the co-op market: In the fourth quarter last year, co-op median sales prices fell almost 8 percent year-over-year, according to data from Miller Samuel.

The 12-story building has housed a number of residents from notable families, including more recent additions of the heir to the Estée Lauder fortune and a member of the wealthy Colombian family that controls brewing giant SABMiller.

Compass’ Alexa Lambert had the listing.

Last year, Lambert moved another co-op in a celebrated building just a few doors down, selling Barbara Walters’ 11-room apartment at 944 Fifth Avenue for $15 million.

The buyer was an entity tied to former Disney president Michael Ovitz and his partner, Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon.