YOU could call it a real estate battle of the bands.
A week from today, two New York condominium developers will vie for the attentions of the city's top brokers and most promising buyers with performances by the pop singer Seal on the Upper West Side and by John Legend, this year's Best New Artist Grammy winner, in the financial district.
In an effort to spur sales in a cooling (some real estate agents prefer to say "stabilizing") market, these developers are trying to outdo their peers in cities like Miami, where fireworks, circus performers and all the tuna tartare you can eat became de rigueur last year.
Without the cachet of "starchitects" like Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel or the locations that buildings like 15 Central Park West or the Plaza Hotel can boast, these developers are turning to pop music muses to create buzz for their projects.
"There is a lot of new development coming on the market and we want to differentiate ourselves from everything else and this will really do it in a way that no one else has done it," said Pamela Liebman, chief executive of the Corcoran Group, the Manhattan brokerage firm that is helping Extell Development Company market the Avery, a new condominium going up on Riverside Boulevard. Extell is spending more than $500,000 to inaugurate the sale of apartments in the building, due to be completed in the fall of 2007, with a party next Thursday on a strip of grass next to its construction site. Seal will perform there under a tent designed to hold 800 people.
"These kind of events have been held in other parts of the country before, but never in New York," said Ms. Liebman. (At least not since Jewel and Marc Anthony gave a concert at Time Warner Center's grand opening party two years ago.)
Until recently, most New York developers tried to woo brokers and buyers with a few hors d'oeuvres and drinks and maybe a D.J. That's apparently not enough for this year's buyers, who have a surfeit of condominium units to choose from.
"I don't think people are really interested in coming to another party where you're given a package of information and a few drinks," said Michael Shvo, a real estate marketer who is working with Leviev Boymelgreen, the developer of 20 Pine: The Collection, a newly opened condominium in the financial district with interiors by Armani/Casa. According to invitations sent out this week, Mr. Legend will be performing on Thursday at the building, where prices for studio apartments start at $600,000.
You can certainly see why the developers want to do whatever they can to rise above a crowded field: there are about 7,600 condo, co-op and rental units being built in Manhattan this year, and another 20,000 planned, according to Yale Robbins, a real estate publishing company in New York.
"We're going to throw a big party so people will at least look at us," said Gary Barnett, president of Extell, which together with the Carlyle Group paid $1.8 billion to buy 20 developable acres of land between 59th and 65th Streets, along with a few other properties, from Donald Trump and a consortium of Hong Kong investors last year.
Extell and Carlyle plan to build a series of six buildings on the land, which overlooks the West Side Highway and the Hudson River to the south of the seven luxury condominiums built over the last few years by Mr. Trump. The Avery will feature one-bedrooms starting at $750,000, with penthouses going for about $3.9 million. Mr. Barnett said this party was as much as anything about "signaling that there's new ownership and we're doing things a bit differently."
Mr. Barnett hastened to distinguish the Avery party from the dozens of extravagant affairs held by condo developers in Miami in the past couple of years. That was "marketing to say 'come in and buy buy buy because it's urgent,' " he said. Prospective buyers at the Avery party would be able to make appointments to visit the sales office, he said, but would not be able to put down any deposits or reserve specific units as they sometimes did at the Miami parties.
"There's another kind of marketing," Mr. Barnett said: "Buy if you want a really fine place to live in."
Seal, evidently, was deemed the best performer to send that message. The building's marketers said they carefully chose him from a list of about 20 possibilities. Acts like the girl band the Pussycat Dolls and Blondie were ruled out as "not appropriate" for the 30- and 40-something professionals the developers were trying to attract, said Selma Nasser, a publicist with Corcoran. Sting, while appropriate, was not available.
Meanwhile, Mr. Shvo, who seemed unaware of the other party featuring a Grammy award-winning pop star, insisted that the 20 Pine fete, which is being held in part as a benefit for the New York Academy of Art, was designed to be different from all other parties. "Anything that we're trying to do, including the building itself, is different," he said.
The project's developer, however, has used lavish parties to hype buildings before, including a two-karat diamond giveaway a year ago at the Marquis, a 306-unit condo in Miami. Boymelgreen spent about $200,000 on that party (about what it will spend on the 20 Pine party), and sold about 60 percent of the building within a month. (Sales have since slowed, and the developer has fired two marketing companies in a row.)
Not all developers are persuaded of the value of such extravagant events. "I cannot say that we've had to do that," said Arthur Zeckendorf, a partner in the development at 15 Central Park West, where 115 of the 201 units have already sold at an average of more than $3,000 a square foot. "It's probably a lot of hype for not much return except to get some press articles."
But Bassie Deitsch, Boymelgreen's marketing and sales director, said the parties were worth the cost. "It promotes the project in a way that gives it a big jump start," she said, noting that 20 Pine's invitation-only party would attract "different characters from New York, different socialites." She declined, however, to name any of them.
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