Cary Tamarkin isn’t bending on his targeted sellout of $161 million.
Despite the glut of luxury homes flooding the market, the developer is launching sales on his Upper West Side luxury building at 555 West End Avenue and asking the same prices he announced in 2015, according to Bloomberg. The cheapest apartment starts at $7.9 million while the building’s two penthouses are asking $18 million and $22.5 million apiece.
“I’m banking on it being very special,” Tamarkin told Bloomberg. “The cheaper you make apartments right now, the quicker they’re going to sell … but it’s not like in the middle of design … we don’t feel that’s what the building calls for.”
In brief, he’s holding out that his conversion of the 1908 building, which used to be a Catholic school, will be unique enough to compel buyers to commit and has even suggested that prices could stand to climb higher.
“When I walked through it recently, I thought: We should actually raise prices … not by being a greedy developer, but because we think the value is there,” he told Bloomberg.
Real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller shared some pragmatic advice for Tamarkin and his partner, CL Investment Group of China: “Right now, we have something in the order of four years of excess supply … even though developers are aware of the competition, it still feels like the same dialogue from five years ago, which is: ‘But I’m different,’” he told the publication. [Bloomberg] —Erin Hudson