An apartment with floor to ceiling windows at 200 E. 20th Street, as shown in listing photos, where two units went into contract last week.
Photo: Douglas Elliman
While many New Yorkers had trouble getting out of bed last Wednesday, not everyone in the city was immobilized by the election results. Luxury-real-estate shoppers, in fact, seem to have had a little spring in their step: signing 39 Manhattan contracts, more than anytime since March, according to Donna Olshan, who tracks the Manhattan luxury-real-estate market.
The elegant Beaux Art lobby of Tribeca condo conversion 108 Leonard, as shown in listing photos, where four contracts were signed last week.
Photo: Douglas Elliman
“Across all my projects, I did almost $30 million in sales last week,” says Elena Sarkissian, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. Those deals included four contracts at 108 Leonard, a handsome McKim, Mead & White condo conversion in Tribeca (where Nicole Kidman bought a place a few years ago, and residents enjoy a 75-foot lap pool and bathrooms finished with black Calacatta marble). The apartments that buyers snapped up — all in cash, of course — were asking between $3.99 million and $6.75 million. Actually, all of the deals Sarkissian did last week were in cash. Had it been election anxiety, not interest rates, holding them back? “No matter where they sit politically, I think buyers were waiting to pass through the election and the insecurity of the election,” Sarkissian says. “The stock market has also been quite robust,” she added.
Jonathan Miller, of appraisal firm Miller Samuel, who recently looked at 20 years of election-year sales data from Manhattan, Los Angeles, Miami, and Suffolk County, says that there is often a subtle dampening of sales in the months leading up to an election, and a subsequent post-election bump. “Sales are off 3 to 5 percent before an election, then catch up from pretty much the day after the election to the next three months,” he says. And this happens no matter which party is projected to or actually does win — some buyers simply seem to be spooked by not knowing and soothed by an outcome. Any outcome.
But for buyers with the luxury of not having to care about interest rates, whose hesitancy had less to do with 30-year mortgages than election-related agita, last week proved freeing. Besides the four deals at 108 Leonard (two of which went to buyers whose parents were paying), Sarkissian sold two other condos at 200 East 20th Street (wide plank white oak floors, floor-to-ceiling windows) in Gramercy to Californian pied-à-terre buyers. Another, at 201 East 74th, a terra-cotta-clad tower on the Upper East Side, sold to a suburban couple who also wanted a pied-à-terre.
An expansive living room in The 74th, as shown in listing photos, a terra cotta Upper East Side building where one contract was signed last week.
Photo: Douglas Elliman
The top contracts of the week, as reported by Olshan, were a four-bedroom penthouse at 247 West 12th Street, asking $15.9 million, that comes with a rooftop terrace and two deeded parking spots, and a $15 million Greek Revival townhouse at 11 Bank Street. Could it have all been a fluke? Wall Street types watching the post-election market surge and feeling good about their bonuses? Anxiety buys among the one percent? “It was a really great week,” says Olshan. “But I’m not convinced it was a bellwether. We’re in a really weird time.”
