One of the major reasons I recently lived in Minnesota, and now live in Texas — despite the fact that a lot of my friends live in New York City (and, in fact, I’m from there) — is because New York City is insanely fucking expensive. I’ve written about this before, yes, but we just hit some new levels of depravity in terms of how the city’s luxury rents look. I wonder what “The Martini Report” would think.
The 39th floor of the Pierre Hotel — random admission that makes me sad: my high school prom was held there — just rented for $500,000 per month. Yep, that’s $6 million/year to rent an apartment. (Although this tenant, whom we don’t know, has only reserved the space through the end of December.) $500K/month is apparently the new record for NYC residential leasing.
The same tenant also reserved a room on the 10th floor — for about $150,000 per month — for entertaining guests.
As for whom the tenant is, we don’t know — but we do know the most aggressive lookers since late-October (when the listing went up) were European, Middle Eastern, and British. (If I had to guess, I’d say Middle Eastern. But what do I know?)
The apartment is about 4,700 square feet and overlooks pretty much most of New York City that one would want to see, up to and including the George Washington Bridge. Here’s an interior pic:
Nice.
There is an apartment listed for sale in New York City at an asking price of $130 million (that’s $11 million/month if you wanted to rent it), although in fairness, that apartment is 12,400 square feet and a triplex.
These are the types of discussions where you really see coastal elitism come into full bore and full play. This summer, I actually met someone who works at the Beverly Wilshire, in Los Angeles. I think that’s the Pretty Woman hotel. The rent on the top floor there is something like $27,000 a week, or a night, or some context I can’t remember. Regardless, it’s a lot. Stuff is nuts with housing and rich people. (As of last summer, the most expensive apartment in San Francisco was about $20K/month, so even though SF as a whole is more expensive than New York, it seems like New York is winning the individual apartment wars. That could also be because there’s less available in San Francisco.)
I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where apartment values can be pretty high — I mean, for fuck’s sake, my high school prom was at the same building where someone is now paying $500K for the month of December to live on the top floor — but I still never fully understand rich people. Although I assume a lot of people in these discussions have inherited wealth, it seems like spending $500K (or even $20K) per month simply on a domicile is weird — especially because I assume people that make that kind of money, or have that kind of money, tend to travel a lot, be it for business or pleasure. Why spend $500K during the holidays, when you might be jetting off to Paris for X-Mas or something?
For the sake of clarity, I believe the most money I’ve ever spent on a single apartment is $1,660 — and yes, that was a 1BR in New York City, but no, it wasn’t in Manhattan.
