Unlocking Gramercy Park

The on-site sales office at 18 Gramercy Park isn’t open yet — it officially launches this month — but four contracts are already out at the luxury condo conversion, according to developers Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf.

What makes this building so special? Aside from its developers — whose résumé includes the indisputably successful 15 Central Park West — the project is one of the 34 residential buildings surrounding Manhattan’s only private park.

Apartments bordering Gramercy Park are relatively rare — especially since the area is a historic district, where many buildings are landmarked, and owners often stay put for years. The residences, mostly co-ops, also come with a much-coveted key to the park, which dates to 1831, when the attorney and landowner Samuel Ruggles divided the surrounding land into lots and created the park. (He was also responsible for establishing the park’s famed key system.)

In recent memory, two other new developments have appeared on the park. The most recent is Mann Realty’s ongoing 51-unit condo conversion of a rental building at 36 Gramercy Park East, which is almost 70 percent sold out. That followed Ian Schrager’s 50 Gramercy Park North, made up of 23 cond-op residences in the 180-room Gramercy Park Hotel. The building, which Schrager overhauled in 2005, is now sold out. The most expensive sponsor sale there was just under $13.3 million.

But 18 Gramercy Park South is looking to surpass previous price records. The majority of the building’s 16 units — all 4,200-square-foot, full-floor four-bedrooms — will go on the market for $14 to $18 million, with a smaller two-bedroom maisonette priced at $9.25 million and a much larger duplex penthouse asking $42 million, according to offering plan documents.

If the penthouse fetches anywhere near its asking price, it would blow away any other sale on the exclusive park.

“The market downtown for large, mint-condition apartments is in that price range,” Arthur Zeckendorf said when asked for the rationale behind the prices. In fact, he said, the brothers are already considering a price hike, possibly in October.

Carol Friedman, a Nest Seekers International broker who manages sales at 36 Gramercy Park East, said that the much-pricier Zeckendorf project will appeal to a different kind of buyer.

To date, the priciest-ever sale of a home in Gramercy Park is the $22 million penthouse at 50 Gramercy Park North, which closed in February 2011, and is currently on the market for $18.9 million.

But the scarcity of large, new apartments bordering the leafy enclave lends credence to the Zeckendorfs’ asking prices, sources said. The fact that the high-end market is strong and that the developers are once again collaborating with architect Robert A.M. Stern and money man Eyal Ofer — the team behind 15 Central Park West — also doesn’t hurt.

“He’s got everything in line to make those apartments reasonable to billionaires,” said Arlene Harrison, the president of the Gramercy Park Block Association and a friend of William Zeckendorf.

In the last decade, the median price for an apartment on the park has nearly tripled, from $339,000 in 2002 to $910,000 in 2012, according to data provided to The Real Deal by appraisal firm Miller Samuel (see chart). This year, there were 25 sales through Aug. 1 (or 42 on an annualized basis), compared to 60 in 2011 and 57 in 2002. However, the transaction volume and prices have tended to spike and fall in line with closings at No. 50 and No. 36, the data show.

This month, TRD examined the recent closings and listings around the perimeter of Gramercy Park to put the prices at the latest development in context.

No. 22

Movie producer Eric Ellenbogen, whose credits include “Lassie” and “Underdog,” paid $2.1 million for 22 Gramercy Park South, an eight-unit building, in 1999, later converting it into two triplex condos. He kept the ground-floor unit for himself and sold the other in February 2011 for nearly $9.2 million to a buyer identified in city records as Bagliani Ririfi LLC. The two owners put the entire building on the market for $22 million with Brown Harris Stevens’ John Burger and the Corcoran Group’s Antonio Cosentino, giving buyers the option to purchase the units individually for $11 million each. (The entire building has actually been on and off the market since 2010.) Bagliani Ririfi sold the upper penthouse for $9.25 million this past March to Amangar Holdings LLC. Ellenbogen sold his triplex in July to a Palo Alto, Calif.–based LLC for slightly less.