20 East 76th Street (The Surrey Residences)

Externally the building is a 1920s Upper East Side side-street elevation: a marble base, gray brick above, terra-cotta trim, and the vertical proportions of the apartment-hotel era. The Landmarks Preservation Commission classifies the style as Neoclassical. Several published accounts describe the building as Art Deco; the Commission's own record does not, and on a 1925–26 completion date Neoclassical is the more defensible reading. The restoration was carried out under Landmarks review, as any exterior work on this lot must be.

The residential floors sit at the top of the stack — 11 through 15 and the penthouse level, with no thirteenth floor. As filed and marketed the conversion produced fourteen homes; three pairs were combined before the tax lots were recorded, which is why the ACRIS schedule shows eleven residential unit lots and why three of them carry compound designations — 12AC, 14AB, 15AB. Recorded unit-lot areas run from roughly 2,100 square feet for the smallest C-line residences to roughly 5,400 square feet for the combined 12AC, with the two penthouses at roughly 2,900 and 5,200 square feet. Every residence is at or above the eleventh floor, which on this block means open sky to the south over the low-rise Madison Avenue frontage.

The interiors were delivered as finished sponsor product rather than as a shell conversion. Buyers evaluating a resale should still establish whether a specific home was combined at the time of conversion or later, because the combined units have a different circulation logic from the single-line ones.

This is the part of the building that requires the most diligence, and the part where the least is on the public record.

A hotel condominium is not an ordinary condominium. The hotel unit carries a large common interest, the residential and hotel components typically share mechanical plant, vertical transportation and life-safety systems, and the documents usually allocate shared costs through a formula rather than a simple percentage. Service to the residences — housekeeping, in-residence dining, spa access, concierge — is generally delivered by the hotel operator under an agreement that can be amended, priced, or in some structures terminated. Common charges in these buildings sit well above conventional Upper East Side condominium levels, and a separate hotel-services charge often sits on top of them.

None of that is a warning; it is the product. But it means the operative documents here are the declaration, the by-laws, any shared-facilities or reciprocal-easement agreement between the hotel and residential units, and the hotel-services agreement — and those documents, not the amenity list, determine what a buyer actually owns and pays. No offering plan for this condominium was located in either offering-plan library at the time of writing, so a buyer should obtain the full plan and all amendments from the sponsor or the managing agent and read them before contract.

The building is also very young in condominium terms. The first closing was August 2025 and roughly ten of eleven residential unit lots had been conveyed by spring 2026. There is no operating history, no audited financial statement covering a full stabilized year, and no reserve base built from resales. Ask for the current budget, the actual first-year operating results, and the sponsor's remaining inventory.

Ownership form: Condominium. Transfers proceed under a right of first refusal rather than a cooperative board approval.

Pied-à-terre, LLC, trust and foreign ownership: Permitted under the standard condominium framework, and the recorded ownership pattern — largely single-purpose entities — reflects it.

Subletting and transient use: Confirm before contract. Hotel-condominium documents commonly restrict short-term and transient occupancy, or channel it through a rental program run by the operator. This is the single most important policy question in the building and it cannot be answered from public records.

Pets, washer/dryer, flip tax: Not documented in the material reviewed. Confirm each with the managing agent.

Real estate taxes: No abatement of any kind. Underwrite the full unabated tax on the specific unit and run True Monthly Carrying Cost analysis against the actual bill, not against a projection.

Recent sales

Recent closings at this building, curated by The Roebling Team research desk. Prices are the transfer amounts recorded with the NYC Department of Finance; apartment-level detail is checked against the building’s own file in The Roebling Research Library before publishing.

Market read. Most recent trades (2026) cleared a median $4,853/sf across 3 sales. Median listing discount 0.0% from the last ask.

Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-01390-7505) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price; square footage from recorded condo declarations and offering plans.

Buyers confuse these constantly, and the addresses are three doors apart. All three sit on the same Department of Finance tax block — Manhattan block 1390 — and each is a separate condominium on its own tax lot:

• 20 East 76th Street (lot 7505, condominium no. 3297) is this building: the 1926 Surrey, converted in 2024–25, eleven recorded residential unit lots sitting above an operating Corinthia hotel.
• 30 East 76th Street (lot 7501) is a separate prewar building converted to condominium in the 1980s, with roughly sixteen residences and a distinctive pitched copper roof. It has no hotel.
• 32 East 76th Street (lot 7502) is The Gallery — Gallery Apartments Condominium, Manhattan condominium no. 94 — a 1980s building of thirty residences over a commercial base, with its own house rules, its own pet restrictions and a 1 percent seller-paid flip tax.

Different vintages, different unit counts, different sponsors, different policy stacks, different price tiers. A comparable pulled from one of these buildings tells you almost nothing about the other two.

Get the offering plan and the shared-facilities documents. They were not available in either library at the time of writing, and in a hotel condominium they are the whole deal. Read the cost-allocation formula between the hotel and residential units, and read the hotel-services agreement.

Ask what the hotel-services charge actually is, separately from common charges, and whether it is fixed, indexed or discretionary.

Confirm the transient-use rules. Whether you may rent your residence short-term, and whether you must do so through the operator, is a document question with real economic consequences.

Understand the unit count. Fourteen residences were filed and marketed; eleven residential unit lots were recorded. If a listing or an appraisal uses one number and the tax record uses the other, they are not describing different buildings.

Underwrite full taxes. No J-51, no 421-a, no exemption of any kind.

Expect Landmarks review for any exterior change. The lot is in the Upper East Side Historic District even though PLUTO's historic-district field is blank for it.

Do not confuse it with 30 or 32 East 76th Street.

The hotel is the product. Casa Tua, the spa and the Corinthia service model are what separate this building from every conventional condominium in Lenox Hill. Lead with them.

Be ready for the carrying-cost conversation. Sophisticated buyers will ask what the hotel service costs on top of common charges. Having the current budget and the actual charge schedule in hand converts an objection into a feature.

Comparables must come from hotel-branded inventory, not from the prewar cooperatives on the surrounding blocks, whose economics, policies and buyer pools are entirely different.

Same-building comparables are thin. With eleven residential unit lots and a sellout that ran barely a year, pricing is a line-by-line exercise. The combined residences and the single-line residences are not interchangeable.

If you're considering 20 East 76th Street, also evaluate:

• The Carlyle (35 East 76th Street) — the other hotel-and-residence building on this block, and the direct historical precedent for what The Surrey has become
• 30 East 76th Street — the prewar condominium two doors east; same block, no hotel, entirely different economics
• 32 East 76th Street — The Gallery; the 1980s condominium on the same block with a documented policy stack
• 55 East 76th Street — prewar cooperative alternative on the same street, east of Madison
• 65 East 76th Street — another East 76th Street cooperative; the traditional-ownership comparison
• 1010 Fifth Avenue — the Fifth Avenue prewar cooperative comparison a few blocks north, for buyers weighing service against park frontage
• 126 East 86th Street — recent Upper East Side new-construction condominium; the unabated-tax comparison at a lower price tier