Daily News
Piling up points
Condo luring buyers with credit card down-payment plan
By LORE CROGHAN
DAILY NEWS BUSINESS WRITER
Use an American Express card to buy a $1 million apartment at the Atelier (above) — your $100,000 down payment will earn you 100,000 rewards points. That's worth: 4 free nights at the St. Regis Hotel in Bora Bora or 100,000 frequent flier miles or a Sony wi-fi system.
Life may take Visa — but the Atelier takes American Express.
Just by using your American Express card to make a down payment on a condo at the 46-story tower on W. 42nd St. near 12th Ave., you can have four free nights at the St. Regis Hotel in Bora Bora — or 100,000 frequent-flier miles.
It's the first condo project in the city to take the card.
The Moinian Group is building luxury condos in one of the last residential frontiers in Manhattan and wants to broaden its arsenal of marketing weapons.
After the breathtaking views of Hudson River sunsets, the glass-doored Sub-Zero fridges in the kitchens, the place to play bocce on the roof, the card deal is one more lure to hook buyers.
Elad Dror, the director of residential properties, thinks this one's a crowd-pleaser.
"If you're a points junkie, who wouldn't love this?" he said.
You can use Am Ex's charge cards, which you pay off at the end of the month — or its credit cards, for which you pay interest if you carry a balance.
Either way, you rack up points you can redeem for pricey stuff like a Sony wi-fi system or a TAG Heuer diamond watch — a staggering number of points for a single transaction.
There are some variations depending on which card you have — but in the Membership Rewards program, which is Am Ex's most popular, each dollar you spend earns you a point.
The condos at 635 W. 42nd St. cost $600,000 to $1.5 million. Down payments run from $60,000 to $150,000 — that's 60,000 to 150,000 points in a single swipe of the card.
If the down payment exceeds your card limit, call Am Ex and they'll figure out how you can do the transaction, company spokeswoman Christine Elliott said.
To rack up the high end of those miles on a plane, you'd have to travel six times around the planet at the equator, or make 25 round-trips from the city to San Francisco.
Am Ex charges the Moinian Group — not the apartment-buyer — for the service, just as it would charge any merchant that takes its cards, she said.
Am Ex hopes to roll out the program with other developers, in the city and elsewhere. It follows on the heels of a service that lets apartment tenants pay rent with their cards — which has been expanded to 34 states. Moinian's one of the landlords whose rental buildings take American Express.
It has taken the developer six months to sell half the 478 condos at the Atelier. The day it launched the down-payment program, an apartment hunter decided to use his card to make a buy, Dror said. In the three weeks since then, seven other buyers have followed suit.
Dror's happy with the down-payment program — he wants to use it at all his future condo developments.
The makeover of 42nd St. west of Eighth Ave. is a work in progress — as two gaping holes in the streetscape attest.
On the corner of 11th Ave., World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein has dug up and removed 41,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil. His cleanup project should be done next month, said Lori O'Connell, a state Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman.
In December, he'll start foundation work for 57-story twin towers with a total of 1,350 rental apartments, said his spokesman Bud Perrone. They'll be completed in 2009.
A small project down the street at 534 W. 42nd should be built in just a year.
Gary Schaeffer — who was a specialist on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for 22 years — has started demolition at the former site of the Jose Quintero Theater, for a nine-story condo project.
It will be a jewel box of a building, with a facade of architect's concrete that will be smooth as glass. The market slowdown doesn't matter to him — he'll have only seven condos to sell. After spending his days screaming on Wall Street, far-West 42nd St. feels like a good place to be.
"Ten years ago, this area was all hookers and crack pipes," Schaeffer said. "But now it's going to be a wonderful neighborhood."
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