Former Waldorf Astoria in New York to test high-end homes market
New York’s closed Waldorf Astoria will re-emerge this week as an apartment building, testing whether nostalgia for a cherished landmark can spark high-dollar deals in a market glutted with luxury homes.
The Park Avenue property, a high-society hangout that counted Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe as tenants, has been getting primed for this moment since 2015. That’s when China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co. bought it for a record $1.95bn (€1.8bn) with plans to convert a portion of the 1,400-room hotel into for-sale apartments.
Five years later, the Waldorf is still a construction zone, Manhattan is awash in ultra-luxury condos and the property’s once high-flying owner has had its wings clipped. Units won’t be ready until 2022, but the developer says the time is right to let the condo-buying public have a look. Their chance will come next week, when a sales office with a model apartment opens.
“So many people — from New York, from all over America — have been inquiring and are very, very interested in owning a piece of something that could never be owned before,” said Dan Tubb, who is overseeing sales at the site for Douglas Elliman Development Marketing.
“We know the market is what it is, but we’re seeing a level of passion and interest for the building that no other building really possesses,” he said.
The developer, now known as Dajia Insurance Group, is pouring more than $1bn into renovations as it tries to recoup a bet made at the top of Manhattan’s luxury homes market, when overseas investors were clamouring to buy second and third homes in new skyscrapers that were rising nearby.
But high-end condos have proliferated since then, and the multimillionaires who can afford them have all but lost interest. In Midtown alone, 763 new units are expected to become available this year, figures from the brokerage Core show.
“The data will tell you that this is not the time for another Midtown luxury condo,” said Donna Olshan, president of Olshan Realty, a high-end brokerage based in Manhattan. The area “is saturated with inventory that could take a decade to sell,” she said.
More than two-thirds of the condos being marketed at the Waldorf have two bedrooms or fewer, Mr Tubb said, and the cheapest is a 526-square-foot studio listed at $1.7m. Two-bedrooms start at $4.75m for a 1,129-square-foot unit on the 19th floor.
