By Gus Saltonstall
The most expensive real estate sale of the year on the Upper West Side took place in recent weeks.
A condo unit within the Extell Development Tower at 50 West 66th Street, between Columbus and Central Park West, sold at the end of last month for $46.775 million, according to property records.
The price tag makes it the most expensive unit sold on the Upper West Side in 2025, according to multiple publications, including Mansion Global.
The 47th-floor apartment has 6,932 square feet of space, five bedrooms, five-and-a-half bathrooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a 288-square-foot terrace that overlooks Central Park.
The apartment was never listed for the public and the buyer purchased the unit under an anonymous LLC, property records show.
On Monday, another massive sale closed in the same building on West 66th Street, as a $44.93-million deal was struck for an apartment on the 42nd floor that spans more than 7,000 square feet, as first reported by the Real Deal.
The buyer also used an anonymous LLC to complete the deal, property records show.
The tower at 50 West 66th Street stands at 70 stories, and faced a variety of backlash and legal action from the start of its construction in 2019. Extell eventually won that legal battle and was able to construct the building to 775 feet, which made it the tallest in the neighborhood.
Extell Development is back in the news again in 2025 as it begins to redevelop the former ABC site on the square block at West 66th to 67th streets, from Columbus to Central Park West, where it plans to construct multiple buildings, including a possible 1,200-foot tower that would again become the tallest address on the Upper West Side.
While $46.775 million is the most expensive real estate deal in the neighborhood in 2025, it does not come close to the $190 million that Billionaire Daniel Och sold his penthouse for at 220 Central Park South in 2022. The sale price on that West 59th Street unit was more than the total GDP of some of the world’s smallest countries.
West Side Rag will continue to report on Extell Development’s real estate dealings on the Upper West Side.
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Wonder why the buyers are not waiting for the Two hundred story towers on that block by the same developer. they will have much better views
Huh?! Surely this is a mistake, the NY Post assured me that all the rich would flee NYC if Mamdani was elected?? Did… did.. they make it all up??
Don’t forget that many of the people who buy these apartments – including a huge swath of those who have bought apartments in the “super talls” on West 57th Street – rarely if ever actually stay in those apartments. It is simply a place “park” their money for tax reasons.
These are foreign buyers only paying property tax not income.
You don’t know that but even if that is true, this individual is putting serious money into NYC real estate. If they expected NYC to go downhill the next four years they would invest elsewhere. Talk is cheap, buying a trophy apartment is expensive!
When they’re not here to begin with, they can’t flee. Who knows who bought this thing? Probably not anyone local.
Yep. The mega-rich, and even sorta-rich, are already snowbirds. They own NYC property, but only spend a few months a year here. Their primary residence is undoubtedly in tax-free south Florida I guarantee the purchaser of this unit fits this description.
i corporation i think.
Don’t worry about these ultra rich folks, they will be just fine. They will just use this property to visit the city once or twice a year. On the other hand, regular folks like you, the naive and idealistic progressive crowd who elected Mamdani, will be the real people stuck here and paying the price of a wavering socialist economy.
Sweden and Canada are both places ItheRW, and they also have billionaires + things like universal child care.
Good luck getting a doctor’s appointment in Canada, and forget dermatology – they are all in “private practice” outside of the insurance scheme.
So you know no Canadians is all you’re saying.
Good luck going into life destroying medical debt
Good for them. Maybe Ericsson or BlackBerry would still make decent phones if they had spent more time innovating and less time perfecting their progressive utopia.
The Chinese use the French TGV highspeed train system.
Boeing passenger jets fall out of the sky.
Smartphone CPUs are made in Taiwan to standards set by ARM, an English company.
Right. Who needs Social Security, Medicare, VA benefits, police and fire protection, etc?
we all do. unfortunately, socialism makes all the above hardly sustainable quickly with time. ask the french.
French budget troubles come from gifts to ibankers and a huge military budget.
Mais biensur…
And the fact that the French currency is now the thinly disguised Deutschemark.
As I’ve said a bunch around here, he was not my first choice for mayor but I suspect he’ll be a whole lot better than the current crook we have in city hall. NYC is going to continue to be a great place to live despite all the panicking from the chicken little crowd that the NYPost is stirring up.
in real life, a crook is sometimes better than a fool
We’ve had enough of crooks lol. Thanks for your time
Adams is both a crook and a fool. Mamdani may be idealistic but I don’t think he is a fool.
He’s highly educated and not a crook haha
I implore you to listen to literally anything he has said.
I have but more importantly I’m watching his appointments. Are you referring to something specific or…?
Not in RE, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess domestic high income money that leaves will be offset by oil money from the middle east buying high end apartments that stay mostly vacant.
That may not be the case. Starting in January (and it applies to LLCs formed prior to January as well), the New York LLC Act goes into effect which will require that all LLC’s file with the state of New York the name and addresses of any individual that owns 25% or more of the limited liability company. The idea behind the law is to prevent anonymous ownership of LLCs and to prevent tax evasion, money laundering, and fraud that may result from anonymous ownership. Whether or not it dissuades Russian oligarchs or oil backed Middle Easterners from buying real estate in NYC remains to be seem, but there are many people in the RE industry that believe it will.
The problem is that domestic high income money pays city and state income taxes, plus it lives in the city, so spends money on services, and pays sales tax and creates jobs. Foreigners who spend 20 days a year vs locals at 330 days a year spend a lot less and pay a lot less in sales tax and create a lot fewer jobs.
This is true, but on the flip side, they pay property taxes and use very little of the city’s resources.
Let’s suppose that every condo like this, high in the sky, great views, gets bought by some billionaire from Lordknowswhereistan, and they’re here 20 days a year:
How does that hurt? The fact is that nobody but the rich can afford them, they won’t be built in the first place if this group didn’t exist. So something is created in thin air, to nobody’s exclusion, that produces a significant amount of real estate tax flow to the City and condo common charges that are used to employ building staff (paid a lot more than scale in many cases), etc.
There is no downside, and no loss in revenue to anyone or anything.
I agree and the city may have to re-calibrate RE taxes vs. income taxes at some point to maintain its budget. I’m not sure if there is any data on “mostly vacant” apartments as I don’t know how you’d even track it, but I wonder if there is a connection between it and the vacant storefronts.
I pay 14K tax’s on one bedroom that has not been renovated in 50 years how much more can they tax me before I have to leave
An excelleet question……
This is called ‘wild speculation’ and you’re free to do so, just label it as such. Clearly whoever is dropping $45m on a (presumably) very nice apartment is doing so because they think the future of NYC is bright.
Not exactly — they are making their OWN future bright…
They’d buy in miami if they didn’t see nyc’s future. All these NYPost articles are trying to create easy buy-outs for these gold card types
Thats why I used the words “go out on a limb”. And while you are right, just remember there are two sides to the transaction. Perhaps the seller didn’t think the future was so bright? No idea. But if I was wealthy and lived in a country prone to instability, or one where my wealth could be confiscated, I think you could do worse than parking a big chunk of change in a Manhattan apartment as an insurance policy.
This seller is planning a 1,200 foot tall building 500 feet from this one and another, about 350 feet tall, between those, for which plans were just filed.
Might that answer your question whether the seller doesn’t think our future is so bright?
And yes, a lot of these high in the sky condos are money parked by wealthy people in less stable countries looking for safe havens.
But if this place stops being a safe haven it’s more likely a result of our national government, not a local one.
Cant wait to read all the progressive comments about how bad it is to have such wealth around us… With the usual “lets feed and house the homeless instead”… Those “evil billionaires”…
Listen Ebenezer, it’s the holidays so why don’t you tone it down a bit. You can kick snow on Tiny Tim anytime you want, how about thinking of someone else for a change?
Or what, your cranberry sauce won’t thicken up properly?
And no, one doesn’t have to be rich (and certainly nowhere near as rich as these buyers) to mock the cacophony of “equality” nonsense stemming from the left.
Seems like a quick cynical response.
These apartments are just more local examples of the growing inequality in this country.
It’s not just the homeless. Many of your UWS neighbors are struggling or just squeaking by.
People should move to where the cost of living is cheaper.
Or we can make our city affordable HAAHAHAHAHA
The cost of living isn’t a fixed, naturally occurring thing. The cost of living is high because of the choices we have made. I think that the people who don’t like tall buildings should be the ones to move.
Right – if you don’t like tall buildings maybe don’t live in the only city in the US that has them and let the rest of us appreciate the benefits of big city living. Common sense really.
here we go, it took 1 hour. my advice to my “struggling” UWS neighbors, just move out of the city if it became too expensive. supply and demand dictates our world, not naive and humanistic empty values.
re:”my advice to my ‘struggling’ UWS neighbors, just move out of the city…”
I picture you saying (with a sneer): Let them eat cake!
Or, as Trump would say, “let them eat nothing.”
Let them call a mover.
I assume this apartment will be empty most of the time. Who would plan to live in that building now when all the construction going on across the street will mean noise, dust, and traffic problems for the next decade.
Weren’t the Reiss’s family trying to sell their mansion on 75/riverside Dr last year for 60+m?
I was under the impression that when purchasing a condo, house in NYC that the purchaser can NOT use a LLC.
There is not a restriction purchasing a property in NYC as an LLC.
Indirectly you may be blocked from purchasing a coop by the board as an LLC.
In this particular case it is a condo, with the buyer an LLC created in Delaware.
That’s not the case. You can use an LLC to purchase real estate of any kind in NYC. However, starting in January, the LLC must disclose to NYS the identity of anyone that controls or owns 25% or more the interests in that LLC.
The transparency act you are referring to also has exemptions
for example venture capital advisors do not need to disclose, they must fill out the attestion of exemption. the act basically follows the exemptions at the federal level with more than 20 referenced.
You are correct, but I suspect that an LLC like this is highly unlike to check the box for one of those exemptions. Having said that, with the changes to the Federal Act I have no idea what impact it will have on the NY LLC Act.
No point in living there if the apartment doesn’t have its own helipad.
But I guess the entity making the purchase may be just speculating, and have no intention of visiting as person or as a corporate person.
with grinches like you around the block, for sure they wont want to spend time visiting
Have you not read the book “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” or seen the cartoon version?
Tax the everloving hell out of these people
Well, they probably paid 6% of the purchase price in City and State taxes plus we have a marginal tax rate of about 50% in NY for high earners so it sounds like they are paying quite a bit of taxes.
Depends on the composition of the LLC,
There are ownership entities that can avoid the real estate transfer tax for example. Also where marginal tax rate does not apply. On top of that they can file attestation of exemption when the law is in place next year.
Annual taxes Only if it’s your primary address I thought.
Please build more luxury apartments so we get more tax dollars.
That’s not a home. It’s an office building.
Five bedrooms, but how many garrisons? Does it have direct access to the armory?
The Gilded Age has returned after 150 years.
There’s an affordability crisis???
Mayor Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist will bring these prices down! he said so!!
Is anyone else as sick to death as I am of hearing “Extell” and “Gary Barnett” all the time? And for those who believe in the so-called New World Order (which I do not), how many people know that Extell is the real estate “arm” of The Carlyle Group, one of the top 10 alleged members of that group?
This is not true. Extell and the Carlyle Group are not affiliated nor does one own the other. What is true is that for certain, specified projects, The Carlyle Group and Extell are joint venture partners which is not uncommon in real estate transactions. I suspect (but only my opinion) that Carlyle will contribute most of the equity to acquire/own the property and Extell will provide their construction and development expertise in exchange for various fees (and they likely put in some portion of the equity).
It looks like Extell and the Group are partners, and the Group does not actually own Extell, even part of it.
Finally the UWS is moving into the big leagues!
There goes the neighborhood. Time was, the ultra-wealthy all lived on the Upper East Side.