Ultra-Luxury Pulls Ahead: Compass Advisor Ian Slater on New York’s Divided Market

But do you know what I love about real estate that keeps it so interesting and keeps me pretty confident that I'm going to have a job for a long time is that there's so much confusing, like almost art adjacent data, not even data around how things trade in New York and how things trade around as far as one building can outstrip another building because of the reputation of the architect or reputation of the buyer, like the reputation of the doorman.

So I always use this example.

is that there's two buildings in New York, one Central Park West and 15 Central Park West.

They're right next to each other at the base of Central Park West.

One of them is a Trump building built as a hotel condominium.

It has a restaurant.

It has a pool.

It has the same views.

It's the same height.

It has very nice finishes.

15 Central Park West, built, similar time, pool, restaurant, better amenities, different architect, no hotel component.

15 Central Park West probably trades at a 3x price per square foot as one Central Park West.

Why is that? If you were to input that into just a data set, would get confused but you have to understand the architect reputation you have to understand the reputation of the buyer pool you have to understand like historic trends of those obviously the trump brand in new york city has been harmed so there's there's always like a lot that you have to interpret as well because if you were just to feed that through an ai machine it might not interpret that i had a family that i was working with who lives downtown who wanted to move to the upper east side And a massive trend that we've started to see is that Families that have a lot of money and have multiple kids, they want double-wide townhouses now.

So people are calling them like Frankenhouses, similar to how people in London take down.

In New York, we can't really do that because we have granite.

So to have a townhouse, people go wide.

And what that allows you to do, many of our houses are 20 to 25 feet wide.

It's just how they were built in New York.

So they tend to feel vertical.

If you put two of them next to each other and you've got a 40 foot or even a 50 footer, you can have these like super grand rooms.

So some of the most expensive transactions in the city that have been like kind of mind blowing prices per foot have been these like 40 to 50 foot wide houses.

There's not that many of them and they're very, very hard to build.

So I said in the past, like, month, I've had six of my clients ask me for double white houses.

So I was shopping for a client on the Upper East Side and nobody in New York wants to do work.

Nobody wants to do work.