At a glance
Firm: Centaur Properties Founder & principal: Harlan Berger (Founder & CEO) Founded: 1996 (New York City) Headquarters: New York, NY (Flatiron) Focus: Boutique investment, development, and management — concentrated in Manhattan's downtown corridors (SoHo, Tribeca, West Village, Flatiron, and Chelsea), with a signature line of design-forward, ground-up luxury condominiums in Chelsea and West Chelsea Frequent design partners: SLCE Architects; Isay Weinfeld (design architect at Jardim) Frequent development partner: Greyscale Development Group (co-developer at Jardim) Portfolio scale: A boutique, hands-on portfolio of residential, office, and retail assets rather than a high-volume merchant-builder pipeline Signature reputation: A small, curatorial developer that pairs strong downtown sites with name architects and sells its finished condominiums well Source: The Roebling Team at Compass — verified against public records, court filings, and published reporting. July 2026.
Who Centaur Properties is
Centaur Properties is the boutique New York investment and development firm founded by Harlan Berger, who has led it as founder and chief executive since 1996. It is not a large, high-count builder; it is a hands-on shop that describes its own posture as the resources of a larger firm with a boutique, curatorial approach. Its holdings cluster in Manhattan's most established downtown neighborhoods — SoHo, Tribeca, the West Village, Flatiron, and Chelsea — and span residential, office, and retail, mixing repositioning and rebranding of existing assets with a smaller line of ground-up luxury condominiums.
For a buyer, the relevant point is selectivity. Centaur builds few residential projects, but the ones it does build sit on strong Chelsea and West Chelsea sites, carry recognizable architecture, and have sold through at the top of their submarket. This is a developer whose residential output is measured in a handful of well-located, design-driven buildings rather than a rolling pipeline.
A note on attribution: some third-party listings loosely name other principals for Centaur. The verifiable public record — reporting, corporate filings, and the firm's own materials — identifies Harlan Berger as the firm's founder and principal. We attribute leadership only to what that record supports.
What they build
Centaur's residential signature is the design-forward downtown condominium — a small building on a hard-to-assemble site, executed with an architect whose name carries weight. That approach produced two distinct Chelsea buildings a decade apart: a contemporary, amenity-rich full-service building on lower Eighth Avenue, and a garden-centered pair of towers on the High Line that marked a celebrated architect's New York debut.
The firm typically works at boutique scale — buildings measured in dozens of residences, not hundreds — which concentrates value, supports high per-square-foot pricing, and lets the architecture and the site do the selling. Centaur's non-residential work (SoHo retail and office, the Chelsea site long associated with the immersive production Sleep No More) reflects the same downtown, asset-by-asset focus.
Buildings by Centaur Properties
Centaur projects already profiled on this site:
- 305W16 (127 Eighth Avenue) — the 2008, 53-residence full-service Chelsea building by SLCE Architects, run under condominium-style rules, that launched sales in 2011 and sold out within roughly a year and a half
- Jardim (527 West 27th Street) — the 36-residence West Chelsea condominium of twin cast-concrete towers around a planted courtyard, the first New York project of Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld, co-developed with Greyscale Development Group
Track record and market performance
By the measure that matters most — does the finished product sell, and at what price — Centaur's residential record is strong. 305W16 launched sales in 2011 and was effectively sold out by the end of 2012, and it has since traded actively as a resale across its full unit range. Jardim sits at the upper end of the West Chelsea condominium market: its unusually large residences (averaging roughly 2,500 square feet), Weinfeld's architecture, the garden setting, and the High Line address have supported premium pricing, with individual homes closing in the eight figures. For a buyer, that sell-through and resale history is a real signal — it points to durable demand and a developer whose pricing the market has repeatedly validated.
Reputation and what a buyer should know
On build quality, Centaur's completed condominiums have a clean public record. Based on published reporting and court filings, there is no known construction-defect litigation, no condo-board defect action, and no documented pattern of homeowner quality complaints — facade, water intrusion, mechanical, or structural — against either finished building. As with any developer, standard diligence should still include a direct lien-and-violation check on the specific unit and building at closing.
The disputes that do appear in the record are commercial and financial, not quality-related, and a buyer should read them as such:
- At Jardim, the condominium board brought an action in 2024 concerning a disputed board assessment and unpaid common charges on unsold commercial units held by the sponsor — a sponsor-versus-board money dispute over an assessment, not a construction-defect or building-quality claim. Centaur's counsel has said the sponsor paid its condominium fees and was disputing the assessment amount.
- Separately, Centaur pursued and prevailed in a commercial landlord-tenant dispute over unpaid rent with the Sleep No More production at its Chelsea theater site — a tenancy and rent matter entirely unrelated to any residential condominium's construction or quality.
Those are the kinds of ordinary commercial disagreements that surface around any active owner-developer. Neither bears on the physical quality of the finished condominiums. For a buyer, standard new-development diligence applies — read the offering plan, confirm lien and title status, review the warranty and punch list, and check the reserve and assessment history — with no defect-related red flag specific to this sponsor.
The Roebling Team on Centaur buildings
We publish developer profiles because a buyer choosing a new-construction or recently-converted condominium is, in part, betting on the developer — its quality, its staying power, and its record when things go wrong. The Roebling Team at Compass tracks the sponsors behind Manhattan's luxury inventory building by building, and we bring that context to every new-development transaction: what the developer has built, how those buildings have held value, and what to verify before you sign.
If you're evaluating a Centaur building — or weighing it against another sponsor's product — a 30-minute consultation is the right starting point.
Corey Cohen, Principal · The Roebling Team at Compass 646.939.7375 · c.cohen@compass.com
This developer profile reflects publicly available information — including NYC public records, court filings, and published reporting — and The Roebling Team's transaction experience. It is provided for research purposes and is not legal advice; nothing here alleges wrongdoing or building defects beyond what the cited public record supports. The Roebling Team at Compass does not represent Centaur Properties. © 2026 The Roebling Team at Compass.