Paying Top Dollar for Condos, and Leaving Them Empty - NYTimes.com.
There are no reliable statistics on the number of pieds-à-terre in New York City, but real estate experts say that global economic jitters have drawn more and more astonishingly wealthy people into the market in recent years. They come from all over, whether Monaco, Moscow or Texas, looking for a safe place to put their money, as well as a trophy, and perhaps a second — or third or fourth or fifth — home while they’re at it.
“It is a safe haven,” said Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “It’s not coming from just one country; it’s a global phenomenon.”
Scott Avram, an assistant vice president at Toll Brothers City Living, a company that builds luxury condos, said 40 percent of the buyers at the Touraine, a project at 65th Street and Lexington Avenue, were from foreign countries.
And the ultraluxury condo building One57 on West 57th Street, where two apartments are in contract for at least $90 million, has had billionaire buyers from Britain, Canada, China and Nigeria, as well as from America.
Then there is the $88 million crash pad at 15 Central Park West, bought last year by a trust linked to Ekaterina Rybolovleva, then 22 years old. Ms. Rybolovleva is the daughter of a Russian billionaire in the fertilizer industry, Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is in the middle of a rather expensive divorce. In a lawsuit filed last year, Mr. Rybolovlev’s wife, Elena Rybolovleva, alleged that the apartment was bought not as a place for their daughter to live, but as a way to put that money out of the older Ms. Rybolovleva’s reach. According to court documents, the younger Ms. Rybolovleva is a resident of Monaco.
The building at 15 Central Park West has its share of pieds-à-terre, real estate professionals say. But the concentration there is not as high as in other brutally expensive buildings, especially those in Midtown that share space and services with hotels, like the Plaza or the Time Warner Center, which shares a building with the Mandarin Oriental.
“I was living on the 16th floor, and I was pretty much the only one there,” said Charlie Attias, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group who rented an apartment at the Plaza for three years and has handled many transactions in the building. “We had the occasional visitor — I mean, the occasional owner — once in a while.”
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