New at 1055 Park Avenue

This bldg is going up on a very narrow townhouse lot. I wonder if the interior will end up feeling extremely tight. I also have to imagine the monthly fees will be out of this world if there really are only four units in the entire bldg.

I believe there are five units offered to the public, with the remaining (2 or 3 units, including the commercial frontage) retained by the developer for his use.
Anyone with a summary of the Condo Offering Plan for 1055 Park, please post for evaluation.

No condo declaration filed yet.

If I was a purchaser of one the five "non-Davis units" I would ask that the developer put 5 years of the building's common charges into an escrow account for possible use. See Crain's article below:

Condo buildings, which have less stringent financial requirements for initial purchase than co-ops do, face another threat. As owners lose their jobs or their bonuses, they quit paying common charges. And in the deteriorating real estate market, developers are increasingly left paying common charges for unsold units—a burden that could push some of them into bankruptcy.

“If developers default, everyone else will eventually have to pick up the balance,” says Jeff Reich, a partner at Wolf Haldenstein.
Meanwhile, operating costs—including water, sewage and labor—continue escalating. Many co-op managers point to real estate taxes for the hefty maintenance fee spikes. To help fill the city's $4 billion budget gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council recently boosted property taxes 7%.

“The city hit owners at a very bad time,” Mr. Kuperberg says. “Values of homes are decreasing, and people are struggling to pay their mortgage.”

Some condo owners claim that developers misrepresent operating expenses to attract buyers. Other estimates may be made in good faith but are outdated in a short time. One new Madison Avenue condo was forced to raise common charges 25% this year, according to Mr. Reich.

“It's a perfect storm,” he says. “Expenses are increasing, and people who [relied on financing] for an obscene amount of the price of their condos are seeing values decline.”

From the Real Deal, today...
Developer Trevor Davis would rather buy a two-carat blue-white diamond than a 10-carat yellow diamond.

He used the diamond analogy to describe his latest project, 1055 Park Avenue, and the comparison seems apt today, as the diamond market, much like the real estate market, has fallen precipitously after a seemingly unstoppable rise over the past several years.

With a small, rare gem, he added, "The value is always there." The same goes, Davis said, for his 12-story glass condominium on the corner of Park Avenue and East 87th Street, by far the smallest in his 30 years of developing apartment buildings on the Upper East Side.

The building will have five apartments starting at $15 million each when it opens next month, including three four-bedroom, 3,200-square-foot duplexes; one five-bedroom triplex with a private terrace; and a two-bedroom penthouse duplex with a roof terrace.

Will the developer consider chopping up the mini-mansions into more "affordable" pieces — say, one-beds for $3.5 million — if they do not find takers in a market where ultra-luxury buyers are in retreat?

No need, said Davis. In fact, "we're in contract with [a buyer] for the top five floors of the building. We got our asking price." That apartment, if the deal goes through, will combine the duplex penthouse with the triplex below to create a six-bedroom "pentaplex, we call it," he said.

Davis claims he is not putting up a small building to accommodate an anorexic market. Rather, he said, having dissolved RFR Davis, his two-decade-long partnership with Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, in 2005, "I took a step backwards while everybody was going crazy, building all over the place. I was ostensibly out of the real estate market — with hindsight a good place to be in the current economic environment. Then I decided I would rather concentrate on building smaller projects."

Davis acquired the corner property seven years ago and kept it in his pocket while he continued producing high-rise condominiums, including the Michael Graves-designed, 55-story 425 Fifth Avenue, and Park Avenue Place on East 55th Street. For the latter, he employed architectural firms H. Thomas O'Hara and Kohn Pedersen Fox, both of which he used again on 1055 Park Avenue.

The small site — the building will be just 19 feet deep on the Park Avenue side and run 100 feet long on 87th Street — has some unique attributes. Besides occupying a corner, Davis said, the lot "intrigued me because for some reason they had forgotten to include it in the Park Avenue District, which stopped at 86th Street and began again on the north side of 87th Street. There was this one sliver that was outside of the landmarked district."

The odd glitch gave the developer liberty to build any sort of façade for the structure, as long as he met the zoning requirement to build only up to the height of the parapet of the adjacent building to the south, at 1049 Park Avenue.

Along with the 22-story 45 Park Avenue, designed by Costas Kondylis, 1055 Park will be one of only a few all-glass buildings among the historic prewar apartment buildings on Park Avenue.

Residents of 1055 Park, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox and encased in red-brick fritted glass panels that drench the interiors in southern light, will be exposed to public view when they choose not to engage the motorized shades.

"The longer length of each room faces out on the glass," said Nancy Ruddy of Cetra/Ruddy, which designed the interiors. "A beautiful, very modern interconnecting staircase floats along the glass wall."

Situated at the corner of the front end of the building, the living rooms will have views up and down Park Avenue through 10-foot-high, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, as will the master bedroom suites above.

The interior finishes will be minimal, and "the whole apartment is a symphony of different whites," said Ruddy, including polished white Corian kitchen countertops and glossy lacquer cabinets, as well as bathrooms with "Rhino White" floors, vanity and walls. The starkly contrasting 5-inch black-oak plank flooring throughout the apartments, said Ruddy, "feels suede-like and sumptuous underfoot."

The condominium will likely have one of the most underutilized doormen in the city and a live-in super. The building's five owners — or four, should the pentaplex combination come through — will share a basement fitness room, and each will serve on the condo board.

Aside from adding a modern glass façade to old Park Avenue, the building managed an even rarer feat: getting construction financing in a nearly frozen credit market.

In fact, said Davis, "We just got a financing commitment from two banks [in mid-March]. Even in a lousy market, you can still get financing if you have the right site in the right location and the right track record."

Then again, he added, "I'm not sure why. I'm not questioning why."

If Davis's response seems a bit dazed, perhaps it was because just a week before he had watched his family's enormous Dutchess County mansion, which he custom built, burn to the ground.

"It was the chimney," he said. "I will build it again."

FOOTNOTE: Thatched roof, no less. Must have been a dumb insurance company that insured it.

Anyone know why Sotheby's International got the hook from being the exclusive? Their name and name of their agents were given the "white-out" on the banner along 87th and Park.
Inquiring minds would like to know if this is a good time to bottom fish at this new project?

Model apartment on the 3rd floor to open next week. Getting Spiffy!!!

The new sales agent, The Marketing Directors, must have advised the direction of getting a model apartment up and showing. Their motto is "The Art and Science of Residential Marketing".

Does this include Hypnotise???

verb (often be hypnotized) [ trans. ]
produce a state of hypnosis in (someone)
• capture the whole attention of (someone); fascinate : hypnotized by the rain, Eric stared across the street.

The fat lady is whistling. More bad press. Cash flow must be tight. See another project below from "The Real Deal" of 11/18/09:

Davis Development Holdings, led by investor Trevor Davis, is facing a $17 million foreclosure lawsuit from Manhattan-based Ark Real Estate Partners after defaulting on his Upper East Side condominium site at Lexington and 65th Street. Davis, the former development partner of RFR Holding's Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, missed a $94,800 mortgage payment in October and fell behind on payments to MRC Contracting, according to the suit. The lender is now demanding a total of $19.5 million, which includes outstanding interest, principal and late charges. The lender said it reserved the right to appoint a receiver to take over the project, according to the suit, filed Oct. 26, in New York State Supreme Court.

What I found amazing about this project is how quickly it went up. Either construction teams have a lot of time these days or there was another reason.

It has been slow to end as you can see with all the unskilled labor now on site. Cash Flow has to be strained at the Davis franchise.