Prewar Fifth Avenue duplex co-op with Central Park views for .75 million. Agent: Raphael De Niro, Douglas Elliman, 212-460-0655 (Evan Joseph)
It’s an old story: Guy asks a cute girl for her phone number. She tells him to get lost. He is suddenly extra curious about her.
It’s more or less the same story with Upper East Side co-ops: The wealthy enjoy being told ‘no’ by the likes of 740 Park Ave. (which reportedly turned away Barbra Streisand), 820 Fifth Ave. (which dinged Steve Wynn and Ron Perelman), 4 E. 66th St. (Perelman again) and 834 Fifth Ave. (you guessed it: Perelman).
“I’ve found they’ve gotten more difficult,” Dolly Lenz, Douglas Elliman’s vice chair, says of co-op boards. After the financial crisis, boards felt even more entitled to dig around prospective buyers’ lives and finances. “They’ve had investigative reports on purchasers — and that wasn’t the case before.”
And prices have risen. “The co-ops are definitely increasing [in price] at a pace consistent with a recovering economy,” says Wendy Maitland, managing director at Town Residential. “And the more prestigious buildings have set a few records.” (Last year, David Geffen purchased Denise Rich’s 12,000-square-foot spread at 785 Fifth Ave. for a record $54 million.)
“I think [the neighborhood’s popularity] is driven by schools,” says Raphael De Niro, managing diretor of Douglas Elliman. “And the certain convenience of living near Fifth or Madison Avenue — high-end apartment buyers want to have that at their fingertips.”
And if not a co-op, buyers are looking at the neighborhood’s magnificent townhouses.
“The way a townhouse fits into this, it offers the most square footage for the least price per square foot,” says Paula Del Nunzio, managing director of Brown Harris Stevens. But even at a lower price per square foot, these townhouses are fetching never-before-seen prices. (According to Douglas Elliman’s market data, in 2012 the average price per square foot of a townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan increased 5.8 percent from $1,697 to $1,796. A four-bedroom co-op on the Upper East Side, however, reached an all-time high of $3,708 per square foot in the second quarter of 2012.)
Del Nunzio’s townhouse listings including a $24.5 million listing on East 65th Street; a $30 million one on East 74th Street; and the Woolworth Mansion, on East 80th Street, for $90 million.
“Hurricane Sandy made a lot of people look at the Upper East Side again, which had been sleepy for a long time,” Lenz says. Her clients include Marc Jacobs, whose West Village home at Superior Ink was damaged by Sandy. “When he was on his tour [of an Upper East Side townhouse], he said he’d never move downtown again,” Lenz says. “It’s become the new trendy place to be.”