Manhattan’s biggest new condo tower has reached a milestone: Buyers have signed contracts for 100 units at the property that Extell Development Co. is building on the Lower East Side. Only 715 more sales to go.
In a market brimming with luxury construction and wealthy buyers holding back amid so many choices, Extell is tasked with selling out a veritable neighborhood at its One Manhattan Square project on South Street. At 815 units, the tower has the second-largest number of condos in any single Manhattan building and the most for a newly built property.
Extell began sales in late 2015 with an outreach to Asian buyers, and then cut prices on many of the homes. Now, with a new sales office open, the $1.4 billion construction tab fully financed and the tower more than halfway to its 823-foot (251-meter) height, the developer is pushing harder, enticing brokers to bring in clients by promising to pay half their commissions upfront. At the same time, Extell is raising prices.
“It tells the market that we’re confident about our product and that we are selling well, selling fast,” Raizy Haas, Extell’s senior vice president of development, said on a tour of the 8,000-square-foot (743-square-meter) sales gallery, carved inside an active self-storage warehouse. “We feel there’s still room for future price increases.”
Boom’s Aftermath
Extell, which set off Manhattan’s luxury construction boom with its One57 skyscraper, where a penthouse sold for a record $100.5 million, is now charting a course through the aftermath. Instead of aiming for the elusive high-net-worth investor, Extell is broadening its reach at One Manhattan Square, where one-bedroom apartments, which make up almost half of the project, can be had for about $1.2 million.
It’s a strategic pricing plan in a year when 4,282 newly built units are expected to reach the Manhattan market, about double the number that were listed in 2016, according to brokerage Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. But Extell’s got competition: “mid-market” apartments, those priced from $1,800 to $2,400 a square foot, are expected to account for more than 1,000 of the new listings in 2017, the brokerage said.
Extell faces other hurdles at the project, a 2-acre (0.8-hectare) site east of Chinatown and beside the Manhattan Bridge, according to Donna Olshan, president of luxury brokerage Olshan Realty Inc.
“I’ve never seen anything that large, and in an area in Manhattan that would be considered remote,” said Olshan, whose firm isn’t connected with One Manhattan Square. “This is a new location -- an untested, unproven location -- and they’re trying to build a community around it. It’s gutsy any way you slice it, no matter what the market is.”
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