Singer’s Former Condo Goes Platinum

THE Time Warner Center was New York’s premier development when it opened a few years ago, and it has come a long way since.

Back in 2004, Ricky Martin, the pop star, bought a new apartment on the 65th floor of the south tower for $6.8 million.

The apartment is a four-bedroom condominium with 65 linear feet of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Central Park and Columbus Circle, and Mr. Martin sold it in September 2006 for $9.75 million. He pocketed a 30 percent gain.

Since then, he paid about $6.3 million for a condo in another new development, at 40 Bond Street.

Now comes word that the buyers of Mr. Martin’s Time Warner condo have signed a contract to flip it, a little more than a year later, for about $17.9 million, according to brokers, not quite doubling their money.

According to the listing by Elizabeth Lee Sample and Brenda S. Powers, brokers at Brown Harris Stevens, the buyers had actually enlarged the apartment a bit by getting permission to incorporate a slice of the hallway into the apartment to create “a formal foyer, which leads into a grand gallery with direct Central Park views.”

The sale price was about $1 million below the initial asking price of $18.9 million when the apartment went on the market in early October. The sale price works out to roughly $5,885 a square foot.

Source:  NYTimes.com