Skip to main content
The New York Times

BIG DEAL: Sky-High, as in the Rent Check

By: Alexei Barrionuevo
Published: 7/29/2012Source: The New York Times

EVEN though sales of pricey, high-end apartments tend to get the most attention, New York at its core is a city of renters.

Renters of those units might be allowed to make some cosmetic changes, especially in the kitchens.

About 75 percent of Manhattan dwellers write monthly checks to the landlord. While it can sound odd to talk about the advantages of renting in a city that is prohibitively expensive for most Americans, there are benefits.

Renters don’t have to lay down massive deposits, suffer the headache of dealing with condo and co-op boards, or pay taxes, common charges and big repair bills after signing away their savings.

Most of us have no choice but to rent, given the hefty deposits required. But in the world of high-end real estate, there are some renters who clearly can afford to buy multimillion-dollar residences but choose to rent instead. They’re a small segment of the market, these “super renters.” Or, given some of the new rental properties — including the penthouses at New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street — perhaps it’s better to call them “sky-high renters.”

Starting in September, the development, which is currently one of the tallest residential structures in the Americas at 870 feet, hopes to rent the three penthouses on the 76th floor for $45,000 to $60,000 a month.

For those doing the quick math, that means an annual cash outlay of $720,000 for the largest, north-facing penthouse, which is 3,800 square feet spread over four bedrooms, or about $16 per square foot per month.

Will they get any takers? Especially when the undulating window design by the starchitect Frank Gehry lets you see and be seen by your penthouse neighbor, and possibly even by a neighbor below? These are some of the questions that arose from my tour of the penthouses this week.

The monthly rent might seem shocking to some. But as I learned, there are already enough renters in New York City paying more than $30,000 a month that some real estate brokers actually specialize in renting to the very wealthy.

Dennis Hughes, a broker with Corcoran, is one of them. In April he rented an apartment on Broadway in SoHo, which is owned by an actor, to a foreign couple for $40,000 a month. It is a 4,000-square-foot home with three bedrooms and a home office. It is the renter’s third residence in the United States, and the other two are in Texas and Beverly Hills. “They do not own anything in the U.S.,” Mr. Hughes said. “They prefer for tax reasons to rent.”

He has also been trying to help an investment banker from New York to land an 8,000-square-foot apartment in Carnegie Hill. The banker, who bid $100,000 a month after the owner asked for $135,000, is waiting to hear back.

A good number of town houses are renting for more than $50,000 a month, and some penthouses in condo buildings are also going for $50,000 or more, brokers say.

“There are so many different scenarios why people choose to rent and not buy,” Mr. Hughes said.

But one overarching reason is that the wealthy often don’t want to downgrade their lifestyle, even briefly. A movie actor from Los Angeles recently rented a 3,200-square-foot apartment on the Upper East Side for more than $33,000 a month while he appears in a Broadway show. Another investment-banker client is willing to spend as much as $100,000 a month on a rental while he searches for a large home to buy in the area, Mr. Hughes said.

Top athletes and musicians who live a lot of their lives on the road often choose the convenience of renting, at least for a while. Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees paid $30,000 a month in 2009 and 2010 to live in a two-bedroom apartment owned by Leroy Schecter on the 35th floor of 15 Central Park West.

Then there are the home renovators. About four years ago, when the market was considerably softer, a family paid $30,000 a month for a year to rent a Fifth Avenue apartment while a central air-conditioning system was installed in their Park Avenue residence, Mr. Hughes said.

But the idea that an all-rental building could command rents exceeding $20,000 a month is relatively new in New York, brokers say.

For the moment, at least, the only one that seems to be trying is One MiMA Tower in Midtown, where three residences on the 63rd floor have been listed for $20,000 to $25,000 a month.

The largest, Penthouse C-D, which was combined, has three bedrooms and four bathrooms spread over 2,200 square feet. One penthouse has already been rented since coming on the market in mid-May, but two remain, said Daria Salusbury, a senior vice president of the Related Company, the building’s developer and manager.

One MiMA apartments were originally built as condos before the decision was made to rent them. In addition to open West Side views of the Hudson; 44,000 square feet of amenity spaces; and fairly high-end finishes, “you have privacy,” Ms. Salusbury said. “You can’t see other apartments; you can’t even see your own neighbors.”

That isn’t true at New York by Gehry, where you can stand at the window of the master bedroom of the north penthouse, renting for $60,000, and look to your left and see part of the west penthouse. You can see into the window of the apartment below that as well.

“There is the whole vertical living thing here,” said MaryAnne Gilmartin, an executive vice president of the Forest City Ratner Companies, the building’s developer (and the developer of The New York Times building). “There are a lot of social connections in the building. There are little pieces and slivers of the building where you are looking into other units.”

To each his own, but to me that seems the biggest downside of the Gehry penthouses, along with interior finishes that, while supposedly designed by Mr. Gehry himself, don’t seem quite up to the standard of the top-flight condo buildings Ms. Gilmartin says they are competing with.

There may be some room for improvement. Officials said they were open to allowing renters to make changes, in the kitchen and closets in particular. “We recognize that clientele at this level might desire a different look and feel in the kitchen,” she said, “and we are open to those types of changes.”

She also said that a few celebrities and sports figures had already asked to see the penthouses.

One potential bonus of renting the north penthouse: a 500-square-foot studio apartment on the same floor, which Forest City Ratner is currently thinking will be included with the $60,000-a-month rent.

As I stood in the penthouse’s sprawling main room, where the ceilings reach 13 feet near the undulating windows that fan out from west to east, I realized these sky-high rentals could draw a crowd for their truly spectacular views alone. The apartment seems almost level with the new World Trade Center, and you can see the Santiago Calatrava-designed Transportation Hub still under construction; the 57-story Woolworth Building is a neighbor, and the rest of Manhattan disappears over the horizon looking north from downtown.

“You have a perspective of Central Park” at the 15 Central Park West building, said Bruce Ratner, the chairman and chief executive of Forest City Ratner, who took in the view with me. “But there is no perspective I am aware of that you live in that is a perspective of New York. This is it.”

Copyright © 2012 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.  Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times. 

Please click here to read the article on nytimes.com

RETURN TO PRESS PAGE