By MAX GROSS
April 10, 2008
Late last year, Wendy Maitland, managing director for Brown Harris Stevens' ID Marketing Group, met with a British interior designer who was looking to buy a New York apartment. Maitland's client was interested in the penthouse at One Madison. It was a full floor, measured a spacious 3,300 square feet and had four bedrooms.
But, it turns out, that wasn't nearly enough space.
"He said, 'I need another floor,'" Maitland recalls. But that, too, wasn't enough. "Then he said, 'I need another floor!'"
Her client wound up buying three floors of the not-yet-finished 60-story tower. Taken together, he racked up a hair under 10,000 square feet of space. It is currently configured with 12 bedrooms (but he might slim it down to eight or 10). The cost of this mega-triplex was $31 million.
While much of the real-estate market collectively holds its breath and steels itself for what could be a shaky year, super high-end apartments are getting only more opulent. Apartments that are larger than 3,000 square feet and that have more than three bedrooms are all the rage, and plenty of brokers and developers are seeing buyers to take two or three big apartments and make even larger combos.
"When we started sales for V33, 100 percent of the buyers who came to look at the penthouse wanted to resize it," says Maitland about the new six-unit TriBeCa building, the smallest unit of which is 3,300 square feet. "Every single buyer!"
The penthouse has since been combined with an adjoining unit to make a 7,162-square-foot home with 3,693 square feet of outdoor space that is listed for $22 million and has an offer pending.
Now that real-estate professionals realize that bigger is better (and more profitable), they're combining units even before buyers ask them to do so.
"When we started, the whole building [which still includes some rentals] was 58 units," says Richard Steinberg, senior managing director at Warburg Realty, about Diamond House, a condo conversion on the Upper East Side. "Of the 34 apartments available in the first stage, we combined and reduced to 22 units." And 21 of those units have sold.
"Three people bought multiple apartments," says Steinberg. "One bought five, one bought three and another bought three."
