250 West 81st Street (Two Fifty West 81st)Recorded sales & closing prices

The sellout ran from March 2019 into 2020 and moved quickly for a delivery of its size, with the great majority of the 28 residences closing inside about fifteen months of the first deed. The offering plan, accepted for filing in October 2017, was amended at least thirteen times, and the thirteenth amendment in December 2019 repriced two of the remaining lower-floor residences — the ordinary tail-end pricing adjustment of a sellout, and a useful reminder that launch pricing and closed pricing are different data sets.

Resale activity since has been thin but steady, concentrated in the lower and middle floors, with a handful of upper-floor and full-floor homes trading in the 2020s. On a dollars-per-square-foot basis the building prices in the upper band for Upper West Side condominium product, and the comparable set is small: it is the short list of new-construction condominiums between Riverside and Central Park West, not the prewar cooperative inventory that surrounds it, whose financing rules, policy stack and buyer pool are structurally different.

Two variables move the true monthly number here more than the headline price does. The first is the absence of any tax abatement, which puts this building's carrying cost above abated new-construction inventory elsewhere in Manhattan from day one and permanently, not on a step-up schedule. The second is the amenity load spread across 28 homes. Index any market statement to the last complete year rather than to a partial one. Unit-level transaction history is maintained in The Roebling Research Library and shared with clients during diligence.