Once upon a time, the duplex apartment on the seventh and eighth floors of 834 Fifth Avenue was the city’s most expensive home for sale, listing last April for an utterly unbelievable $120 million. And while the price was shocking, the fact that it was in that particular building—which tycoons like Rupert Murdoch and Elizabeth Arden have called home—was not.
Still, it couldn’t find a buyer at that price—because really, how many buyers are there for nine-digit real estate?—and so it was price chopped. The first discount came just about a year ago, when the home re-listed for $96 million; and after a brief spell off the market, it reappeared today with an even lower asking price of $76 million.
That’s still a lot of cash, but it at least puts this unit in the same range as similar apartments in the super-duper-luxury market, such as the Sherry-Netherland penthouse (currently listed for $78 million).
The owner, socialite Susan Gutfreund (the widow of the late financier John Gutfreund), has apparently come to her senses as far as pricing goes. Her broker, Brown Harris Stevens’s John Burger, told The Real Deal (which first reported the sale) that the new asking price “reflects the price of the last transaction in the building in this size category.” That would be another duplex, which New York Jets owner Woody Johnson sold to Ukrainian-born American billionaire Leonard Blavatnik for a whopping $77.5 million in 2015, which broke the record for the priciest co-op ever sold in NYC. So hey, you never know.
The apartment is a co-listing with both Burger/BHS, and Larry Kaiser of Berkshire Hathaway Homeservices New York Properties.
The photos haven’t changed from the last time Gutfreund’s apartment listed, but here’s the floorplan again:
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