Manhattan’s Tallest Condo Building Joins a Swamped Luxury Market

(Bloomberg) -- On paper, it’s the most expensive condo tower in the U.S. And at 1,550 feet above Manhattan, it’s also the Western Hemisphere’s tallest.

Extell Development is building Central Park Tower, the firm’s ultra-luxury follow-up to One57, the Billionaires’ Row skyscraper that touched off the city’s high-end construction boom -- and set the stage for the market’s current slowdown.

Costly condos aren’t “flying off the shelves like One57 did when we started six or seven years ago, when we were the only game in town,” Gary Barnett, president of Extell, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “There’s certainly much more competition.”

The world’s well-heeled condo investors have a lot of inventory to choose from in Manhattan -- and these days, they’re not in a hurry to close a deal, especially for the priciest units. Billionaires’ Row, the Midtown corridor known for its concentration of new ultra-luxury towers, saw the biggest decline in the value of contracts signed in the second quarter, according to a report by Core. The median price of pending purchases dropped 91% from a year earlier to $5.14 million, the brokerage said.

At their current listed prices, Central Park Tower’s 179 apartments have a combined value of more than $4 billion, making it the most expensive condo project in the country, by Extell’s estimates. Listings made public on the property’s website include a $63 million five-bedroom apartment with 7,074 square feet (657 square meters) of space. Less pricey offerings include a two-bedroom unit for $6.9 million.

Barnett declined to say how many condos have found buyers since sales began last year at the building, on West 57th Street. It topped out in August and has a Nordstrom store at its base that’s set to open next month.

Individually, Barnett said, the apartments are a bargain compared with a neighborhood competitor, Vornado’s 220 Central Park South, where Citadel founder Ken Griffin set a national price record with his $238 million purchase. On a per-square-foot basis, Central Park Tower’s condos are priced about 15% lower, Barnett estimates.

“We’ve priced for this market,” he said. “That doesn’t mean to say that we won’t have to discount a little bit.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Oshrat Carmiel in New York at ocarmiel1@bloomberg.net;Viviana Hurtado in New York at vhurtado2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rob Urban at robprag@bloomberg.net, Christine Maurus

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