From $120 million to about $59 million, this property owned by Susan Guttfreund, who was married to the “King of Wall Street,” has gone from sky-high to just normally high.
Serena Boardman at Sotheby’s International made a change to the apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue by decreasing the asking price to $59 million, according to StreetEasy. The decline represents a dip from the last offer of $68 million. The Real Deal reports that Boardman is co-listing the property with Larry Kaiser of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New York Properties.
After Gutfreund’s husband died in 2016, she listed the apartment at the astonishing price of $120 million, making it to the most expensive listing in the city at that time.
“The home is very formal, traditional and European. It makes no sense for how people live today,” a broker said to the New York Post in 2017, “It needs as much of a gut renovation as you could possibly do. It’s perfectly nice for a tea party but it is way too dated.”
Anyone who buys the property will want to bring over some guests because there are 22 rooms and views of Central Park. A total of seven bathrooms and seven bedrooms gives guests or a whole family plenty of elegance and privacy. The Real Deal describes the property designed by Rosario Candela back during the 1930s as being done in the “eighteenth century style, with parquet de Versailles flooring and hand carved moldings.”
The Jewish Voice has reported on declining prices on some prime real estate. The New York Post’s Christopher Cameron took time to analyze the situation, and reported that “many of the old-guard Good Buildings have seen better days. After floundering on the market since 2012, a spacious two-bedroom apartment seeking $2.3 million at 550 Park failed to find a buyer, despite a 36 percent price decrease. Luxury co-ops, once the most stable block of inventory in New York, have seen their prices fall 20 percent from 2014 to 2018, according to top real-estate appraiser Jonathan Miller.”
At 740 Park, Cameron chronicled, “ceaseless publicity, a fire and a crumbling facade have driven choosy oligarchs elsewhere. Susan Gutfreund, the owner of the best apartment in 834 Fifth (widely considered Fifth Avenue’s foremost), can’t find a buyer for her 22-room, 12,000-square-foot duplex. Its asking price is down from $120 million to $68 million. River House was reduced to allowing actress Uma Thurman to purchase a 12-room spread at an $8.5 million discount.”
Recently built luxury condos with tasteful design elements and vastly superior amenities have displaced many of the old guard. “What’s more, condos don’t have intrusive co-op boards, which dissect an applicant’s financials to an embarrassing degree,” the Post noted. “Now the trader who wants to live in his business rival’s building doesn’t have to pull his pants down to get in.”
