HOME BUT NOT ALONE

WHEN YOU VISIT THE WEB SITE FOR 100 WEST 18TH, A NEW 41-unit condo building in Chelsea, up pops pictures of young, attractive people engaging in young, attractive single-people activities – working out, shooting pool, making out. There are no pictures of families, despite the fact that more than half of the building’s units are two-bedrooms . Nor is there any mention of kids’ amenities.

“We don’t have a children’s playroom,” says Vicki Sparks, director of sales at the Brauser Group, the building’s developer. “Instead, we have a club lounge with a party room.”

Other buildings can keep their FAO Schwarz-branded playrooms and on-call nannies: 100 West 18th is positioning itself as a place for young singles. Bucking the conventional wisdom that markets condos to couples, developers like Brauser Group are going after affluent single buyers – and creating buildings just for them.

“We looked at the building, and thought, ‘Who is going to move in here?'” Sparks says, recalling marketing meetings for her project. Areas like the roof deck with an outdoor shower were designed for socializing. The first eight buyers are single, Sparks says.Most plan to use their second bedroom as an office.

Targeting singles makes sense given the changing demographics. “The biggest change in real estate in the last 30 years is these new buyers,” says Jeffrey Levine, president of Douglaston Development. “They’re in their 30s, they’re notmarried yet, and they don’t want to live where their parents did.”

Douglaston Development is behind 555W23, a 337-unit building with mostly studios and one-bedrooms. Communal areas include a second-floor lounge designed by the team behindHotel Gansevoort; it features a fireplace, two big-screen TVs and pool tables. “There’s a party here almost every weekend,” saysMichael Hopewell, 36, who moved into the building last year and estimates that 70 percent of 555W23 is single.

With statistics like that, why ever leave the building? For his part,Hopewell has gone out with two women at 555W23. “I wouldn’t recommend against it,” he says of dating within your own building, “but it’s a bit more complicated.”

Hopewell’s friend and across-the-hall neighbor, Amir Feder, 32, doesn’t need to date; he met his fiancée, Renée Klapmeyer, via his real-estate agent. On the night Feder closed on his apartment, the broker took him out for a drink and just happened to invite Klapmeyer along, too.

According to Feder, amenities like high-tech gyms are tailored to young single professionals. “Buildings are a lot sexier than the ones that were built 10 years ago,” he says.

Accompanying this new crop of “singleton” buildings are ads Live here and take it off targeted at single buyers. Buy at The Met in downtown Miami, and you might just find your soul mate. One ad for the complex shows a couple in a lustful embrace with the text: “We fell in love the moment we Met.”

Things get even racier in the marketing materials for Andre Balazs’ forthcoming William Beaver House in the Financial District. Drawings of attractive young people in various stage of undress fill the Web site, while the promotional video reminds buyers of the “showers big enough for three.” Other building perks seem tailormade for hooking up: There’s a glass-bottomed Jacuzzi, a pool with a “wetdeck” bar, a cinema and a private nightclub.

Despite announcing to the New York Times late last year, “If you have children, go to Battery Park City,” Balazs now insists his building isn’t just a place for hedonistic singles. Couples, and quite possibly families, he says, will be moving in. A singles-only building, he says, wouldn’t be desirable.

“It would be monolithic,” he says. “You want variety.”

“It’s a narrow market to be chasing singles,” says Jamie LeFrak, principal at the Lefrak Organization, a Manhattan-based developer. “There’s a good group of people who are cool and single and making money, but it’s a limited group.”

According to LeFrak, rental buildings have always been marketed to singles. Just look at Atlas New York and New Gotham, two Manhattan buildings owned by Gotham Developers. They regularly host listening parties, sake tastings and special spa treatments. In the summer, bands play on the roof.

“People have definitely started dating after meeting at these things,” says Michael Morris, president of Concierge Service International, which caters events for Gotham Developers. “I mean, it doesn’t turn into a scene from ‘Caligula,’ but you can tell things are going on.”

It’s little wonder that buyers now expect an equally happening social scene from a condo. “It certainly is a lot of fun,” says Edgar Pejorom, 36, a resident at 1100 Wilshire, a 228-unit downtown Los Angeles conversion that’s quickly gained a reputation as a hip building. On any given night, residents gather around the rooftop pool for drinks or grill dinner on the barbecue. (How “Melrose Place”!)

Pejorom, who moved in earlier this year, may have missed the raucous New Year’s Eve festivities, but residents who attended recall naked girls in the rooftop hot tub and report that an 18th-floor party ended only because the police arrived.

It remains to be seen if the actual buyers in buildings like 100 West 18th and the William Beaver House (which has as its mascot a hard-drinking furry cartoon bachelor with a MySpace page) live up to the marketing hype. But the massive crowd at November’s William Beaver launch party would have fit right in at Lotus or Stereo. It wasn’t clear if the scene and the models offering free drinks were enough to convince anybody to get their checkbook out, but it was a great party.