In what will surely go down as one of the most splendid flips in the history of ultra-posh New York City real estate, the young hedge fund executive Scott Bommer and his wife Donya, once an anchor for "Good Day Philadelphia," have sold their duplex penthouse at 1060 Fifth Avenue for around $48.9 million, according to a source.

Not only does the sale come in the middle of a relatively sludgy, even gloomy real estate market, but there's the downright flabbergasting fact that the Bommers bought the apartment only this January. They paid $46 million, setting a record for a Manhattan co-op sale.  read more »

Two years ago, in one of the most awesomely honest interviews ever given about a very, very expensive apartment, Seema Kalia, the wife of hedge fund manager Vedula Murti, told The Observer about her new $7,127,750 triplex in the 104-year-old mansion at 3 East 75th Street. "You know that sometimes people buy great houses and have no taste?" Ms. Kalia said then. "Well, we have no taste, so we put it in the hands of someone who does." She hired Madonna's designer, Jamie Drake, to fix up the space--not to mention The Dirty Sock Funtime Band to play for her 4-year-old daughter's friends in the apartment.  read more »

Fiscally conservative, octogenarian leveraged-buyout billionaires who served in Nixon’s cabinet can be incredibly generous to their buddies.

Pete Peterson, the co-founder and senior chairman of the Blackstone Group, and the chairman emeritus of the massively powerful Council on Foreign Relations, has bought that organization’s apartment at the huge Imperial House co-op on East 69th Street. According to city records, he paid the council $3,040,000.

Why would Mr. Peterson, who bought David Geffen’s $37.5 million duplex on Fifth Avenue last year, pick up a petite co-op? “Let me give you the background,” Mr. Peterson said after returning The Observer’s phone call, much to The Observer’s surprise.  read more »

Architects make for neurotic, itchy apartment buyers. “I would never live in anything I design,” Peter Eisenman told The Observer last year. “If you were a son of mine, I wouldn’t want you to be an architect because it’s a tough way to be in the world.”

But Enrique Norten, the star Mexican architect who was commissioned three years ago to build a Guggenheim museum in Guadalajara, spent $1,929,000 this month for an apartment at One York Street, the hefty, sharp building he designed in northern Tribeca.

He doesn’t mind living within his own work (he has a place in one of his Mexican buildings, Parque España), although he’s taking down some walls in the apartment, plus changing some finishes and appliances in the bathroom and the kitchen.  read more »

Seven months after getting disbarred for his ties to a personal-injury practice in Long Island City that belonged to a non-attorney who’d made his money in taxicab medallions, and 10 months after closing on a $35 million mansion on East 62nd Street that Madonna had bid on, the lawyer turned real estate investor Keith Rubenstein has made another real estate deal. But it’s more modest.

According to city records, he and his wife, Inga, an art collector and ex-model, spent $3.2 million on a two-bedroom duplex at 101 Warren Street, the massive new Tribeca condo building.

It’s a much smaller place than the penthouse (marketed as a “skyhome”) that Mr.  read more »

James H. Herbert II, the chairman and chief executive of the very ritzy First Republic Bank, listed his penthouse at Trump Parc East on Central Park South earlier this month for $38 million, nearly four times what he paid back in 2005.

That’s a sign that the annual onslaught of post-Labor Day real estate listings (most brokers don’t bother putting anything good on the market in hot, deadened August) will be as giddily ambitious as always. And considering that the apartment is being listed by Stribling at 25,866,600 euros (monthly maintenance fees and taxes are given bi-continentally, too), it’s also a sign that brokers are still hoping to lure the gaggle of foreign buyers that have been feasting on Manhattan real estate—despite evidence that the dollar is regaining some ground.  read more »

Last November--on what must have surely been a sad day for the kind of New Yorker who obsesses over 17-room Fifth Avenue apartments with ballroom ceilings imported from 17th-century Venetian palaces and marble staircases carved from Michelangelo’s quarry--the Kress family’s famous penthouse duplex at 1020 Fifth Avenue was taken off the market.

At that time, a source told The Observer that the listing, which, oddly, hadn’t been given to any one broker (though certain shiny-shoed brokers from certain brokerages were allowed to advertise the duplex on their Web sites), had come off the market because of “loose ends” that had to be cleared up by the estate.  read more »

Actresses don’t tend to have a particularly easy time getting into Upper East Side co-ops. At River House, the building so wonderfully correct that real estate brokers cannot use its name in marketing materials, Diane Keaton was turned down back when she was a bachelorette linked to Woody Allen, and Joan Crawford was rejected, too (though apparently because Coca-Cola’s president was in the building, and Ms. Crawford was on Pepsi’s board).

But Renée Zellweger has outsmarted the neighborhood.

According to city records, the 39-year-old actress has gradually amassed an $8.2 million spread in a small, unassuming co-op at 82nd Street and Madison Avenue.  read more »

Westchester corrugated-cardboard magnate Dennis Mehiel tasted the sorrowful, sour lows of Manhattan high-end real estate in September 2002, back when he was the running mate to H. Carl McCall, the Democratic nominee for New York governor.

“What does it take to get the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor?” asked a front-page article in the right-leaning Sun. “Something less, it appears, than the qualifications for buying an apartment in the Dakota.”

Mr. Mehiel had been rejected by the beloved Central Park West co-op’s board, which, as far as bad news goes, wasn’t as salacious as some of the political leaks that year, but is still enough to make a multimillionaire blush.  read more »

It’s hard to grasp what mortgage-backed securities are, or why they’re wreaking gruesome havoc on the global economy. (Actually, an excellent little article by a Slate editorial assistant named Chris Wilson explains that companies like Bear Stearns buy up bouquets of mortgages from primary lenders, then use monthly payments from homeowners as a nice little revenue stream—a plan that backfires when the housing market wobbles or interest rates climb.)

But back in the rosier days of March 2005, when Anilesh Ahuja had recently become the head of the multibillion-dollar mortgage-backed securities group at Deutsche Bank, he and his wife spent $7.  read more »