Azure Caters to Upper East Side’s Big Appetite
Size does matter, or that's what buyers are intimating on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and Azure is giving the people what they want.
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Writer
New York—Size does matter, or that’s what buyers are intimating on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Azure is giving the people what they want. The DeMatteis Organizations and the Mattone Group, developers of the 128-residence luxury residential building, designed Azure to accommodate the merging of units and now the partners are seeing an increase in requests from those who want to buy two units to create a single multi-bedroom domicile.
Azure opened its doors in 2010, offering upscale homes small enough for the single tenant and large enough for a family, with price tags that would not cause prospective buyers to break into a cold sweat. Fast forward, and it’s the larger units that are moving up on the list. In what turns out to have been a wise decision, the developers and project designer SLCE Architects built Azure with two-bedroom corner units that could be fused with a neighboring unit to create the increasingly coveted four-bedroom dwelling. Five of these four-bedrooms in the 34-story tower at 333 East 91st St. have been snapped up in the last three months.
“We’ve combined bedrooms, opened up walls and even delivered kosher kitchens,” John Caiazzo, vice president of real estate development for DeMatteis, notes in a prepared statement. The unit unification results in a 3,000-square-foot abode featuring not only four bedrooms, but also four-and-a-half bathrooms.”
“We did see at the end of the second quarter slightly more activity in transactions of larger unit sizes above 2,000 square feet on the Upper East Side,” Quinn Eddins, director of research at real estate data and analytics company Radar Logic Inc., tells MHN. “It’s a trend we’re seeing in Manhattan as a whole; sales of units of larger size are increasing year-over-year.”
If bigger is better on the Manhattan scene right now, it’s more about timing than anything else. “It’s a reflection of the general firming of the market,” Eddins explains. “The Manhattan condominium market is in the midst of a recovery. After prices and sales dipped in 2009, we clawed our way back—not all the way back, but we’re coming back at a moderate pace. We’re still a long way from where we were pre-crash.” The upswing in the market is evident at Azure, where $60 million worth of inventory—including many a four-bedroom residence—has sold since the property’s sales program commenced in 2010.
Eddins reiterates that the likely reason behind the upsurge of interest in multi-bedroom residences is that “for people who have means, now appears to be a better environment to buy, relative to last year.” He says it is highly unlikely that developers will feel the need to start building properties dominated by large units; however, there’s nothing stopping them from following Azure’s lead and knocking down a few walls.
