Posted by Leonard Steinberg on April 20th, 2013

Has a new pricing insanity set into the New York uber-luxury market with 33 official listings (with many more un-official ones!)above $ 30 million and three over $ 100 million:  Is $ 100 million the new $ 50 million just within a matter of months? It appears so, and I call that hyper-luxoflation!

In this morning’s New York Times an entire article is dedicated to a developers quest to create a massive apartment on top of a rather mediocre building by buying up all the owners of the top floor units. The Times wrote a similar article a few months ago about another $ 100m listing……is this reporting or simply excessive Kardashian-style publicity-seeking? There are other examples of  ‘trophy’ apartments for sale on top of mediocre buildings……and they are not selling. There are too many mediocre properties priced into the stratosphere that simply do not warrant their asking prices, no matter how crazy-active this market is. Yes, there certainly are some outstanding properties asking very high prices……but those prices can be justified. Satisfying the ego of a seller is a dangerous precedent that seems to have found a place in our manic society: just how many Russian oligarch’s are there to buy these properties?

With gold’s plummeting pricing explained by lesser concerns about inflation, why exactly is the very top end of pricing in Manhattan inflating at a pace that is simply outside the realm of reality?