NY coops and cooperative apartment sales: prices, buyers, sellers, details, and deals

An enormous four bedroom, 2 ½ bathroom co-op apartment on the Upper East Side just sold for $7 million, more than 22% below it’s original list price of $8,995,000.


It’s either a sign that folks with money in N.Y.C. co-ops are feeling the effects of the troubled mortgage mess, or that Douglas Elliman Agent Ellen Wagman may have overpriced the apartment.

Perhaps the apartment’s heavily pinked-out appearance put a damper on the price too.

The seller was legendary businesswoman Darla Moore. In the early 1990s, Moore became “the highest-paid woman in banking” with a reputation as “an extremely tough negotiator.” She was a leading powerhouse in Chemical Bank’s bankruptcy group, before the bank was acquired by Chase.

Moore moved back to her grandparents’ old tobacco farm in Lake City, South Carolina, a town that her husband Richard Rainwater describes as being smack in the “middle of bum-fuck nowhere.”

The buyers of Moore’s co-op are James, P. Riley, Jr., retired managing director and partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and his wife Ellen Riley.

Maintenance for the apartment is $4,636 per month. The building is pet-friendly and according to the listing, has a “state of the art gym under construction.”

Energy magnate John Edelman and Manhattan socialite Ingrid Edelman just paid $22 million for a duplex co-op at 775 Park Avenue.


They paid 8.33% less than the asking price of $24 million listed by John Burger, an SVP and Managing Director at Brown Harris Stevens.

The transaction was part of an estate sale following the death of the late Frances Todman in January this year. Todman was the widow of TV game show producer William Todman who, together with Mark Goodson, produced an incredible number of television game show hits like The Price is Right, What’s My Line, I’ve Got a Secret, and To Tell the Truth.

The 12 room, 4 bedroom, 4½ bathroom co-op apartment overlooks Park Avenue on the Southeast corner of East 73rd Street, and features no less than three fireplaces. It’s located in a pre-war building constructed in 1927 by famed New York architect Rosario Candela.

John Edelman made his fortune in the oil business. Ingrid Edelman is a N.Y. socialite and interior decorator who has made political donations to GOP candidates.

Neighbors in the cooperative include:

• Money manager Everett Cook and his wife Karen Cook who are involved with the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women philanthropy. They paid $7,975,000 for their apartment in April 2008.
• Dr. Elizabeth A. Maher, an ophthalmologist who recently obtained sole ownership of a high-floor apartment in the building in a divorce settlement with her ex-husband James Maher.
• Andrew Georges and Heather Georges who paid $7.6 million for a lower floor duplex in 2006
• Former Bank of America media dealmaker Stephen Ketchum and Cynthia Ketchum, who paid $6.2 million for their lower floor apartment in 2005

Photo: Brown Harris Stevens

There’s an open house at 164 West 79th Street for a 4th floor co-op apartment over Memorial Day weekend.

This is 3 bedroom, 3 bath, 1500+ sq. ft. ‘Classic-6′ cooperative is located in an Upper West Side building that’s had quite a few transactions over the last several years.


It’s pet-friendly co-op offering quite a few amenities that most others lack:

• 2 tranquil gardens in the back of the building, including a Zen rock garden;
• A spectacular roof-terrace for all shareholders with completely unobstructed views looking South, views of Central Park facing East, and the Hudson River facing West; and
• A finished children’s playroom in the basement adjacent to the laundry room (below)

Monthly maintenance is $1,853, and buyers must have a minimum of 25% of the purchase price for a downpayment.

Some interesting trivia on this building: this blogger learned from shareholders that The Village People actually used to live in an apartment at 164 West 79th Street, and not in Greenwich Village!

It’s an amazing location for foodies, being only 2 blocks from Zabar’s and H&H bagels, and a few more to Fairway.

Transportation is also a plus: it’s 1 block to the No. 1 subway at Broadway & 79th Street, and block in the other direction to the B and C trains.

What’s unusual about this listing is that there are four brokers from Prudential Douglas Elliman working on it: the husband and wife Michael Rosenblum and Sandra Gansberg, Jamie Heinlein, and Brad Gansberg (Sandra is his aunt!).

Open houses on holiday weekends can be a great opportunity for buyers to check out properties since a good percentage of other interested purchasers will be out of town. For brokers, however, that can be a potential negative — they want all the traffic they can get, and holidays can put a damper on that.

Some brokers offer a mid-week open house in this situation, to try and capture prospects who were out of town over the weekend.

Address: 164 West 79th Street, New York, NY 10024 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side