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Originally Posted by Design-mind
Have they lit the crown yet?
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Not that I know of. I haven't seen it lit.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles...-estate-master
Gary Barnett, Controversial Master of New York City Luxury Real Estate
By Devin Leonard
October 02, 2014
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Some 600 fashionably dressed guests arrive at the newly completed Park Hyatt New York (H) hotel, embedded at the base of the tallest operational residential skyscraper in the city. They’re greeted by black-garbed receptionists, who scrutinize them closely to make sure they belong. Upstairs, the guests encounter friendlier servers offering flutes of pink Champagne. The visitors admire paintings by Richard Serra and Ellsworth Kelly. They nibble on Petrossian caviar and slices of toast topped with briny sea urchin. One man shows up without a jacket and immediately regrets it. “I’m underdressed,” he complains to his companion.
Just before 8 this September evening, the guests are herded into a ballroom with onyx-lined walls, where they’re welcomed by wavy-haired Thomas Pritzker, the billionaire executive chairman of the Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels chain. He invites everybody to join him in a toast to his new inn. “We think we have created the finest product in New York,” Pritzker says. “I think that’s true not just physically, but metaphysically.” He had to look up the latter word in the dictionary, he says.
Before Pritzker raises his glass, he acknowledges someone in the audience. “Gary, to you and your team,” he says, “thank you so much for all that you have done for us.”
Pritzker is gesturing to Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development, the New York real estate company that built One57, the soaring 90-story glass tower that houses the Park Hyatt. Barnett, 58, doesn’t quite fit in at this party. He wears a boxy suit that looks as if he bought it off the rack, and his dark hair twists extravagantly over his bald spot, never entirely concealing it. He has the makings of a five o’clock shadow. He looks embarrassed to be singled out. Barnett admits afterward that he doesn’t know who most of the revelers are in the building he created. “Beats me,” he shrugs. “I’m tired. I want to go home and go to bed.”
.....Barnett has become the unlikely arbiter of stratospherically priced real estate in New York. The residents of the 94 condominiums above the Park Hyatt at One57 relieve themselves in German toilets. They can take a traditional shower in their marble-walled bathrooms or enjoy a more relaxing steam shower. The units on the higher floors have breathtaking views of Central Park. Barnett refers indelicately to this feature of One57 as “the money shot.” “He has a great sense of the luxury market,” says Donald Trump, another developer of tall towers for rich people. “He knows what people want at the high end, and he’s been able to provide that.”
.....Typically, New York real estate developers aspire to emulate their wealthy clients. They buy homes on Park Avenue. They summer in the Hamptons. Barnett lives in a two-story house in middle-class Richmond Hill, Queens, with his second wife, Ayala, who together have 10 children. (His first wife, Evelyn Muller, died of cancer in 1998.) He vacations in the Poconos, a place that advertises its charms on local television. “My kids like it,” Barnett says. “It’s nice and quiet.” People who have worked closely with Barnett say he’s more attracted to the cerebral side of his profession. They say he loves assembling land and development rights, often in secret, and using them to construct unexpectedly large and lucrative projects such as One57. Barnett’s often working on many of them at the same time. “He’s a chess player,” says Leonard Steinberg, president of Urban Compass, a real estate brokerage in the city. “He doesn’t make one move at a time. He makes multiple moves.”
.....He’s plunging ahead with a plan for a second building on 57th Street whose spire could reach 1,775 feet, one foot shorter than One World Trade Center, and loom over One57 and its followers. “It’s basically like sticking an Empire State Building right at the bottom of Central Park,” says Warren St. John, a former New York Times writer who’s leading the opposition to the towers. “The shadow will extend over a mile north. It will stretch all the way across the park. That’s crazy.”
.....One of the first properties Barnett purchased was on 57th Street. “It was a decrepit building,” he says. “It was vacant, obsolete.” But it gave Barnett a foothold in Midtown Manhattan. Carnegie Hall was across the street. Central Park was two blocks away. Barnett says he originally thought he would construct “a plain-vanilla residential building.” But he could make more money if the inhabitants of the upper floors could see the foliage in Central Park, so he started quietly purchasing surrounding buildings to expand his footprint. He also cut deals with property owners on the block to acquire the unused development rights above their buildings. In New York real estate parlance, these are known as “air rights.”
Myers Mermel, CEO of TenantWise, a commercial real estate advisory firm, has searched city records and found that Barnett spent a total of $260 million on six property deals and 12 air-rights deals on the block—some of which involved gnarly negotiations, not just with building owners but with numerous individual condo dwellers. Mermel says he’s never seen a skyscraper builder with such an appetite. “Most developers will never be able to do a deal with this complexity in their lifetime,” he says. “This is Jedi Master stuff.”
.....Around the corner, brothers Arthur and William Zeckendorf had recently completed 15 Central Park West, attracting such buyers as Sting, Alex Rodriguez, Denzel Washington, former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, who’s said to have spent $45 million for his apartment. “It is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the 21st century,” the author Michael Gross writes in House of Outrageous Fortune, his recently published book about the building.
Barnett was sure that he would do just as well. He couldn’t build a tower as wide as 15 Central Park West, but he had amassed enough air rights to construct the tallest residential building in New York. Early in 2008, he persuaded two Abu Dhabi–based government investment funds, Tasameem Real Estate and Aabar Investments, to put up most of the equity in the $1.3 billion project.
Extell was shaken by the real estate downturn in 2008, but Barnett had taken on less debt than other developers and was able to press on with One57. He leased the bottom 25 floors to Hyatt for $375 million—$125 million less than he originally asked. In October 2011, Extell received a $700 million construction loan from a syndicate led by Bank of America (BAC). He began courting the brokerage community, throwing a party on a wintry day where Extell showed off pictures taken by drones of the views from his yet-to-be-constructed tower. “I heard a lot of chatter from seasoned brokers saying, ‘Who the hell is going to pay those prices on 57th Street?’ ” Steinberg says. (To some, the Midtown block is in no man’s land between tony uptown and hip downtown.) “The skeptics changed their tune as soon as they saw those views.”
By the following May, the company had sold $1 billion of apartments, including the $90 million penthouse purchased by a group of investors including Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager. It helped that Barnett had his building under way before any of his rivals. “He was the first one to get his building up and test the market,” says Paula Del Nunzio, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens, who has represented several buyers at One57.
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