Plus, those looking for a status address are willing to pay.
The city saw another record set in May with the sale of a 10,000-square-foot duplex at 740 Park Avenue-an address that both John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis called home-on the Upper East Side for $52.5 million, the most ever paid for a co-op. That same week, casino owner Steve Wynn paid $70 million for a duplex penthouse at The Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South.
The sale in the same week of three properties, within 15 blocks of one another, for a total of $212.5 million is something that's going to be hard to match, Sheftell says.
"I was blown away by it," he says.
The area around Central Park has some of the most coveted residential locations in the city. In addition to the park and Carnegie Hall, the Plaza District is home to Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, numerous art galleries and restaurants and some of the world's most exclusive shops, including Van Cleef & Arpels, Tiffany & Co. and Bergdorf Goodman.
There has also been very little new residential development in the city over the last few years, in part because of the economic downturn.
One57 itself is more than a decade in the making. Extell began buying the properties that make up the site in the late 1990s. The tower sits on what had been several different parcels, including a deli and an umbrella shop, and there were about 10 different transactions involved, Tubb says. The company broke ground on the $1.4 billion tower last year.
So far, it's been an easy sell.
"People are going in, seeing the unit, and putting checks down, just like that," Sheftell says.
"Demand is very strong both domestically and internationally, where there's a lot of liquid cash," Tubb agrees. "They see the New York market as very stable in the long term."