Skyline Tower Dangles Porsches For Penthouse Buyers

What does one get the owner of the highest apartment in one of the tallest buildings in Queens? A Porsche, apparently.

Buyers of penthouses at Skyline Tower, the 67-story tower in Long Island City, will be offered a Porsche with their purchase, Crain’s reported. Eric Benaim, whose brokerage Modern Spaces is handling sales, told the outlet the 802-unit tower is 90 percent sold and this is the first time he’s run a promotion to spur sales.

Seven of the 17 available penthouses have sold without the Porsche-and-a-penthouse deal. Buyers who don’t want the car will get a credit of $200,000 courtesy of developer Chris Jiashu Xu’s firm, United Construction & Development.

The car is the 2024 Porsche 911 Turbo S, which has a going price of $230,400. The offer does not come with a parking spot, but the building offers valet parking.

Benaim blamed sticker shock for the slow progress among the building’s priciest units. The remaining penthouses have last asking prices ranging from $1.8 million for a one-bedroom to $3.9 million for a four-bedroom.

“For Manhattan, this is nothing, but for Long Island City, it’s the height of the market,” Benaim told Crain’s. “So I guess we have to come up with ways to bring people [in].”

The penthouses that have sold have already set area records.

Penthouse 302 sold last year for $2.3 million, or $2,300 per square foot, a borough record for price per square foot. The sale took the title from the 66th-floor apartment at 3 Court Square, which sold in a 2022 bulk sale for $2.9 million, or $2,200 per square foot.

Sales of the building’s penthouse units initially launched with Nest Seekers in 2021 before Modern Spaces, who had been managing sales for the rest of the building since 2019, took over.

Sales launched in 2019 with a projected sellout of $1.1 billion, the priciest ever in Queens.

By Aug. 2022, sales progress at the building had weathered the pandemic and Amazon’s failed plans for a Long Island City campus, to trade 509 of its 802 units. By last August, Skyline had added 78 closings to its tally.

While Xu had not been previously offered discounts on the top-level units — and even raised the prices of a handful of them two years ago.

Benaim told Crain’s that he expects to sell the remaining penthouses by the end of 2024 or early 2025.

— Jake Indursky