A 79th-floor, five-bedroom apartment at 432 Park Avenue was officially listed for sale on Monday for $135 million, or about $16,760 per square foot, after a fruitless nine-month search for an off-market buyer.
The owners, an unidentified American couple that collects Asian art, hired Noel Berk of Engel & Völkers Mercedes Berk in January to find a buyer.
Berk, who at the time said the full-floor unit was too unique to put a price on it, blamed pandemic travel limits for the lack of off-market success.
“The owners of the apartment are ready to sell,” said Berk. “We listed it publicly to be able to get it out to a much broader audience instead of one-on-one introductions.”
The couple, which bought the apartment for $59 million in 2016, spent three years and millions of dollars on an elaborate renovation of the raw space by renowned Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. Imported materials included 1,000-year-old wood and weatherbeaten stones from Kyoto. Several pieces of Sugimoto’s art are also installed throughout the residence and will be included, although Berk said maintaining the apartment as is won’t be a condition of the sale.
Berk declined to say how many showings her team conducted.
“It’s like having an unbelievable piece of artwork at an auction when people can’t come to the auction,” she said. “How are you going to get this out? You have to make it known to as many people as possible.”
Mansion Global reported the listing earlier. It came three months after Saudi retail magnate Fawaz Alhokair listed his penthouse on the 96th floor of 432 Park for $169 million, or $20,472 a foot.
A full-floor unit on the 82nd floor which was listed last August for $90 million has chopped its asking price to $79 million in April, a few months after The New York Times reported on design and construction defects at the 1,400-foot tower.
Eleven smaller units are also listed for sale at the tower, developed by CIM Group and Macklowe Properties. Asking prices range from $23 million to $5.25 million, according to StreetEasy.
In August, a 2,630-square-foot unit on the 80th floor sold for $19.1 million, or $7,262 per foot. The seller was a company linked to missing Chinese national Whitney Duan, who reportedly did business with relatives of China’s previous prime minister Wen Jiabao. Duan surfaced last week, contacting her ex-husband to ask him to stop the publishing of a book he wrote about her disappearance. Another unit linked to Duan on the 72nd floor is in the midst of a foreclosure proceeding.
In January, a full-floor unit on the 34th floor was sold by the developers CIM Group and Macklowe Properties for just under $19.8 million, or $2,448 a foot, property records show. That’s down almost 30 percent from its asking price of $28 million.
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