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Posts Tagged ‘Extell’

One57 Flip Analysis From Manhattan’s Peak New Development

November 15, 2017 | 4:47 pm | | Articles |

For those of you that read my weekly Housing Notes, you’ll know I refer to 2014 as “Peak New Development” for the Manhattan housing market. “Peak Luxury” works as a label too.

Bloomberg news broke the story that a $50M+ condo purchased in 2014 just sold at a foreclosure auction for $36,000,0000. There were five bidders. It’s been the fourth resale since the market peaked and the sixth overall – so I created a graphic of all the resales to show how they fared before and after the 2014 “peak.”


The Bloomberg story (that I got to chime in on) lays out the details of the One57 auction sale: One57 Foreclosure Shatters Price Dreams at Billionaires’ Tower

The story reached #1 as the most read on the 350k± Bloomberg Terminals worldwide yesterday.


It is important to remember that there are still a fair amount of units remaining that are priced at 2014 levels. Extell, the developer, has their work cut out for them to compete with current market conditions.

While One57 is a symbolic poster child for the new dev phenomenon, it is not a proxy for the entire new development market. Some projects were priced more reasonably at the peak, hence they haven’t fallen as much. In addition, the quality and design of each project can vary greatly. One thing is clear – since the 2014 peak, investors don’t have the same potential for big and fast returns on flips – their initial strategy was to buy early and realize instant equity as the sponsor increased the offering prices. That scenario no longer applies. Since the market has more choices for buyers now than it did back during peak, One57 is no longer seen as a “new” building like it was back then.

CNBC picked up the story – My firm and I get a shoutout during the conversation on Sqawkbox which was pretty cool.

Luxury condo in One57 tower sold in New York City’s biggest ever foreclosure auction from CNBC.

And here’s the transcript on yesterday’s PBS Nightly Business Report show (owned by CNBC) with the shoutout that is making the rounds.

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Bloomberg View Column: Giant Condo Tower Needs More Billionaires

September 29, 2014 | 2:26 pm | | Charts |

BVlogo

Read my latest Bloomberg View column Giant Condo Tower Needs More Billionaires. Please join the conversation over at Bloomberg View. Here’s an excerpt…

In post-crash Manhattan’s high-end real estate, few projects loom larger or more visibly than the 1,004-foot-high One57, the tallest residential-hotel building in New York. This is a rarefied market, with two penthouse units selling for more than $90 million each, including one to hedge-fund baron Bill Ackman.

Amid all the hyperventilating about the tower, including complaints that it’s out of scale with the neighborhood, it’s poorly reviewed design and that it casts an afternoon shadow on Central Park in the winter, the little known fact is that the 92-unit building seems to be less of a hit with buyers than one might glean from the PR machine….

[read more]


My Bloomberg View Column Directory

My Bloomberg View RSS feed.

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Heightened Observations on the ‘Billionaires Row’ Phenomenon

April 9, 2014 | 11:05 pm |

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[Source: Vanity Fair, click to expand]

Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic at the New Yorker and voice of design reason, penned a comprehensive overview of the “tall towers” building phenomenon in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. It’s an engrossing piece with stunning visuals as it correctly describes the global trend that is creating it.

I believe Michael Gross, the author of the new book on 15 Central Park West, Manhattan’s truly first super luxury condominium that was wildly successful and oblivious to the global economic crisis, coined the phrase “Billionaire’s Belt” which best describes this new Manhattan submarket and new housing classification. I was pushing “57th Street Corridor” as a label but there were no takers so I’ve modified Michael’s phrase to “Billionaires’ Row” as if all these buildings are fighting to be the best.

I like Goldberger’s description of the new design trend:

…the latest way of housing the rich, is an entirely new kind of tower, pencil-thin and super-tall—so tall, in fact, that one of the new buildings now rising in Manhattan, the 96-story concrete tower at the corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue, 432 Park Avenue, will be 150 feet higher than the Empire State Building when it is finished…

And that these residences provide…

a place not for its full-time residents but for the top 1 percent of the 1 percent to touch down in when the mood strikes.

One thing missing from this piece, and perhaps rightfully so is the discussion of why these projects are being built beyond the notion that the global wealthy are demanding them. In Manhattan, new construction developers have to target the super luxury market because land prices are at record highs – we just came out of a record setting building boom last decade – and few prime sites are available. With a high cost of land, inflated labor and materials costs, the math does’t work otherwise for more mainstream projects.

Our city’s obsession with chronicling lifestyles of the Wall Street rich and dysfunctional in the previous boom with prices of $3,500 to $4,000 per square foot seem downright quaint now. Now upwards of $10,000 per square foot has emerged as the price point for all participants in this market niche to aspire to.

New York City residents don’t seem quite sure what to think about these projects and their likely full time emptiness. One thing is for sure, the world’s elite are now a lot more visible and it’s a lot easier to point fingers…doesn’t One57 kind of look like it’s flipping the city off while it looks at the park?

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Source: New York Observer.

But this global pattern of the wealthy searching for hard assets to invest in doesn’t appear to be ending anytime soon.

And we’ll continue to appraise it.

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