You don’t need a peripatetic childhood as a constantly moving military brat to become a world-class New York real estate flipper, but it helps.
343 W. 19th St.
Bought 0,000 in 1998
Sold .3 million in 2006″ />
24 THOMPSON ST.
Bought 0,000 in 1998
Sold .3 million in 2006 (
)
CENTRE MARKET PLACE
Bought 4 buildings for million in 2004
Sold million in 2010 (
)
Robert Novogratz and his wife, Cortney, have created a mini-empire in home design and media. But it all began with a real estate obsession kicked off by Novogratz growing up without a permanent home. He finally got one at 8 years old, when his parents settled down in Alexandria, Va., and started dealing antiques. So he spent the rest of his childhood at garage sales and flea markets. “I’ve always been a collector of something,” he says.
He didn’t know it then, but he was well on his way to becoming a serial home collector.
Novogratz bought his first property right out of college, when he got a job in finance in Charlotte, NC — a 5,000-square-foot, $79,000 house that he shared with three roommates so he could afford it. Cortney was a college senior nine years his junior when they picked each other up at a Charlotte party. Though she came from South Georgia, or, as she puts it, “ ‘Deliverance’ country,” she was “hellbound for New York,” Robert recalls, and 14 months later, in 1992, they arrived.
Robert found a big, illegal sublet, a rent-controlled prewar on West End Avenue, for $1,500 a month (“I got lucky,” he says). Cortney had “a dive of a place,” too, he recalls, that she rented “to appease her parents.” But she sublet it and lived with Robert.
In 1994, after scouring “the bottom of the New York real estate market,” Cortney says, they bought their first property, 343 W. 19th St., a condemned hovel in West Chelsea near Ninth Avenue. Its owner was “an old construction guy,” Robert says, who took a shine to them and let them have the place for 20 percent down, financing the rest himself, so they could put their limited funds into the fixer-upper.
They couldn’t afford an architect to turn it into a two-family home so, Cortney says, “We decided we could do it ourselves.” They learned by doing. After neighbors filled a container they’d rented for demolition debris with household trash, they hired a denizen of the street to ensure that didn’t happen again. They were out of money by the time they finished, so they not only rented out the upstairs apartment, they sublet bedrooms in theirs, as well. But “we’d found our passion, or it found us,” says Robert, who quit his Wall Street job to become a professional fixer-upper-flipper. Next, “we wanted something worse,” Cortney says and laughs. “The wreck of the century.”
They found it in 1998, a condemned building with an adjacent empty lot on Thompson Street in SoHo, asking $600,000. “Off the beaten path again,” says Robert. “But the SoHo Grand was going up around the corner,” adds Cortney, who’d already had three children and was pregnant with her fourth as they were designing their second and third houses.
They renovated the existing building and moved in. Then, in a year, they saved to build a new one from scratch next door. Renting out the first property, they moved into the second, but at a party they tossed to celebrate, they were offered $75,000 a month for it by a hedge-fund billionaire they won’t name. “It’s a business, so we packed up,” Cortney says. They would eventually sell the two homes to the founder of Rockstar Games and the CEO of a money transfer firm for a total of more than $10 million. The latter would later sell to 7-foot-3 Lithuanian NBA star Zydrunas Ilgauskas.
After several years searching, the Novogratzes found their next project in 2004, four vacant buildings on Centre Market Place, behind the Police Building. They’d been owned by the same Italian family for a century. After spending about $5 million to buy them, “we had no money to renovate,” Cortney recalls, “so we hoped to pre-sell them and custom-build.” Bradley Zipper, a hedge-fund executive friend, commissioned one, a couple from Chicago a second; and by then, the Novogratzes had seven children and become TV stars, thanks to their Bravo reality show, “9 By Design.”
Yet the real estate urge persists, so in 2007, they found their latest project, a one-story motorcycle repair shop on West Street they bought for $4.5 million. Twenty months later, they moved into their new home — with views across the West Side Highway to New Jersey and enough space for their huge brood. And over time, they sold the Chelsea building to a banker for $6.4 million, and the four Centre Market homes for just more than $20 million, with the largest going to George Soros’ son Gregory for close to $12 million.
“We know more now,” says Cortney, “but that doesn’t mean it gets easier.” Still, they’ve started thinking about flipping and moving again.
“We really miss construction,” says Robert. Cortney corrects him. “We miss the chaos.”
Michael Gross is writing a book for Atria about 15 Central Park West.
