Bloomberg is reporting that buyers of luxury apartments from Downtown’s Stella Tower to One57 on Billionaire’s row are buying apartments to rent out. One such apartment was purchased on the 56th floor of Extell’s One57 for just over $10mm and is now on the lease market for $25,000 per month.
According to the streeteasy somewhere around 2% of the luxury condo purchases are being put back on the market for sale in an attempt to flip the property. This number has stayed consistent for the last several years. Developers of Manhattan luxury apartments price so accurately that flipping is pretty much out of the question. Recently, One Riverside Park on the upper west side, also an Extell Project entered the market and was slighly underpriced as evidenced by the velocity of contracts that were sent out immediately so they pulled it back off the market and raised the prices.
As a result, buying and then renting is the choice for investors. However, according to Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, there is not a demand for large luxury rentals so renting out and establishing a new rental price point could be a challenge and cut into the returns of the investor. Typically rates of return or cap rates hover around 3-4% for Manhattan apartments.