These Super Luxury Apartments Rent for the Highest Sums Ever
The gilded condo towers that have sprung up over the past decade along New York’s Billionaire’s Row soar both literally and figuratively above the rest of the city’s ultra-luxury residential market.
They include addresses such as 220 Central Park South, where the hedge fund manager Ken Griffin famously purchased a $240 million penthouse in 2019 – still America’s priciest ever home sale.
But two diminutive Manhattan buildings have quietly climbed to another pinnacle of the luxury residential business by commanding some of the highest rents ever seen.
Maison Hudson, at 401 West Street in the West Village, and Fasano Fifth Avenue, at 815 Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side – each only 10 units in size – charge more than $100,000 a month for some of their apartments and are virtually full, according to people who work on the projects.
In doing so, they have etched out a new niche at the most rarefied heights of the residential market, in part by persuading buyers who might have lavished millions of dollars – or more – to rent instead.
The projects show how the seismic shifts that have rippled through the real estate market in the aftermath of the pandemic and a spike in interest rates have also reshaped behavior among extremely well-heeled home buyers.
“Post Covid, people realize that their time is finite on this world, and they want to have as much experience as they can,” said Tyrone McKillen, a luxury broker and homebuilder based in Los Angeles said.
The response for some, he said, is to live a more itinerant lifestyle. Renting a home versus owning is more conducive to that.
“There’s such thing as billionaire’s guilt – having too many homes that they don’t use,” McKillen said. “You feel guilty for not using it so you’re planning all your trips around the same place. Whereas if you don’t have that, you can stay wherever you want.”
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McKillen, whose brother built a Bel Air mansion that McKillen later sold to the superstar music couple Jay-Z and Beyonce for $88 million in 2017, said he too is interested in developing an elite rental in the Los Angeles area.
“There’s definitely a market for that,” McKillen said.
Expensive marble, high-end millwork — and a lot of it
Erin Boisson Aries, a real estate advisor and broker at Douglas Elliman who is the exclusive marketing and sales agent representing Maison Hudson and Fasano to wealthy clientele, said that rental rates, on a per-square-foot basis, at the buildings exceed what other top-tier apartments have charged by a wide margin.
Although 220 Central Park South is not a rental property, owners there – as they do at other condo properties – sometimes choose to put their units up for rent. Aries said that asking rates there and at other condo buildings at the apex of the for-sale market, such as 432 Park Avenue, can range as high as nearly $300 per square foot.
In comparison, Maison Hudson’s penthouse, which has just been made available to the market, is asking for nearly $600 a square foot, or $120,000 a month. Four duplex units at Fasano rent for $130,000, a rate that amounts to nearly $500 per square foot.
Kira Turnbull for The Collection
“It certainly breaks all records by a significant margin and I think it speaks to the scarcity of this kind of product that caters to short-term clientele at a very high level,” Aries said.
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