Celebrity-favored 15 Central Park West, a limestone-clad twin tower in Manhattan designed by starchitect Robert A.M. Stern, continues its decade-long reign as the city’s most expensive residential building.
The parkside condominium, where the likes of Denzel Washington, Robert De Niro and designer Elie Tahari call home, dominates the market by price per square foot, even though it’s older than some of the tallest, flashiest developments ever built in the city, according to an index real estate analyst CityRealty published on Wednesday.
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Since developers finished 15 Central Park West in 2008, a wave of ultra-high-end new development brought to Manhattan the first supertall residential tower (over 300 meters) in the form of the shimmering glass-covered One57, swiftly followed by the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, 432 Park Avenue.
Celebrities have swarmed to trendy downtown conversions, like The Greenwich Lane, a former hospital redeveloped in 2015, and 443 Greenwich St., a 19th-century book bindery that opened as luxury homes in 2016.
These and other projects ushered in some of Manhattan’s priciest transactions ever. Over the past year, a combo unit at 432 Park sold for $91.1 million and a home at One57 sold for $36.6 million, according to the report on the city’s 100 top buildings, which together indicate the overall strength of the New York City real estate market as an investment.
And yet, 15 Central Park West held its place at the top of the pack in terms of price paid by square foot—an average of $6,045 over the 12 months to March 31, according to the report.
Price growth at the building even rivals stocks and gold, with average sales prices seeing an annual compound growth rate of 6.84% since it opened in 2008. By comparison, the S&P 500 has grown at an annual rate of negative 2%; oil has fallen at an annual rate of 5.1%; and gold has grown at an annual rate of 3.2% in that time, according to data from CityRealty.
Taken as a whole, CityRealty’s Top 100 index grew 0.7% annually over the past decade.
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"The buildings in the CityRealty 100 can be judged as a better, and more stable, investment than many other markets over the past decade," according to the report.
The index offers a window into the overall real estate market in Manhattan, which is expected to see prices increase very little over the coming year, according to the report. Fewer big-ticket sales from new developments like One57, 432 Park and Walker Tower will usher in a new period of price stability, according to CityRealty.
Average prices across the top 100 index hovered $2,445 per square foot in the year through March, and are expected to rise only 1% to $2,491, the report said.