A triplex on Leonard Street, as seen in this listing photo, was rented for $150,000 a month to an ultra-high-net-worth couple who wanted to “try out” the city before buying.
Photo: SERHANT
Lurid details abound in the Nolita crypto-kidnapping case: allegations of chainsaw torture and forced crack use. Night-vision goggles and ballistic helmets recovered from the scene. The presence of two butlers, apparently. Also, the Prince Street townhouse where all of this is alleged to have taken place was a $30,000-a-month rental. It was a particularly gruesome look into a market we don’t know much about: ultra-high-end rental properties and the people who live in them.
But if you talk to brokers who work in this particular real-estate niche, they have a lot of insight into why someone might be willing to pay $15,000 or more than a mortgage’s worth of rent every month — and the kind of person for whom this is the norm. The scale of excess here varies, of course. We recently heard about a minor celebrity paying close to $15,000 a month for a townhouse in northern Brooklyn, which isn’t quite the same as, say, Bad Bunny’s $150,000-a-month penthouse on West 27th Street. But according to the most recent numbers, there are more than 5,600 millionaire-renter households in the New York metro area, up from just 2,200 in 2019. So why rent when you could, by most reasonable metrics, buy a place? Let’s get into it.
Last year, when the home of a New York businessman flooded, he temporarily relocated to a two-bed, two-bath at the Mandarin Oriental Residences, Fifth Avenue. The apartment, totaling over 1,200 square feet, rented for $40,000 a month. Why go so big? Well, for one, it wasn’t his money. “This was an insurance claim, and we got our full asking $40,000, and the renter paid the full broker fee,” says Douglas Elliman real-estate agent Jade Chan, who handled the lease. The decision to hole up in the Mandarin Oriental Residences seemed like the “path of least resistance” for someone at that wealth — and insurance — bracket who had to deal with home repairs and the frustration of not being able to sleep in their own bed, Chan says. “You’re displaced, you have to bring all your shit over, and just want to be able to live conveniently.” Such conveniences, at least in this man’s case, included housekeeping, a private restaurant by Daniel Boulud, and a roof pool.
As for more personal disasters, Donald Brennan, an Engel & Völkers broker, has helped out dads in the middle of divorces looking to stay close to their kids, “which is, in Brownstone Brooklyn, not so easy to do sometimes,” he says. Supply for three- or four-bedroom rentals — big enough for their children to stay over on the weekends, and maybe grand enough to impress for someone newly back on the dating market — can be scarce. This can mean looking for a nicely renovated duplex in a converted multifamily brownstone at upward of $14,000 a month, or “settling” for a massive unit in one of the new builds on the Brooklyn Heights waterfront or in Downtown Brooklyn (the Pierrepont is currently asking $15,150 for a three-bed). These dads are not decamping into depressing one-bedrooms. “There’s an attempt to have some kind of parental equal standing,” he says.
A 34-year-old with a three-bedroom on Central Park West and 73rd Street pays nearly $20,000 a month despite never having had a job “as long as I’ve known him,” one broker tells me. (Though “he’s done freelance city video-editing stuff,” this broker adds.) The unemployed son will inherit the family purse eventually and maybe even buy his own penthouse duplex, but right now his mother is still cutting his rent checks. This is, unsurprisingly, pretty common for the children of the extremely wealthy, says Serhant broker Peter Zaitzeff. It’s considered a launching pad of sorts: Zaitzeff often sees people fresh out of college with finance or marketing jobs who have arrangements with their parents to cover the rent while their salary — $125,000 for, say, a junior analyst — covers the rest of their living expenses. Lots of people in the city get a little help here and there from Mom and Dad, but at this scale? “It’s like using a jet pack for a marathon,” he says.
Last September, when a super-high-net-worth couple were considering a pied-à-terre purchase in the city, they wanted to make sure they even liked it here enough to keep a home for occasional use. So they signed a $150,000-a-month, half-year lease for a penthouse in Tribeca. This is what “try before you buy” looks like for Mountainhead-level wealth. “There’s still people that want to experience something before they plop down $35 million — even a billionaire,” says Zaitzeff, who represented the apartment’s owner in the deal. (The owner, meanwhile, knew the rental price was extreme: “He’s doing it because he doesn’t need or want to rent it out; he’s doing it because he’s thinking, I can get a lot of money on this,” Zaitzeff says.)
So what does such a rental look like? Apparently a six-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath triplex spread across 9,000 square feet, which included walk-in closets the size of studio apartments. Oh, also: 2,000 square feet of outdoor space, a garage, a gym in the building, and cobblestones on the block. “What attracted them to it was the sense of ‘Oh I could be here or this family member or that family member could be here too, and it still feels intimate,’” he says, noting the couple both had children from previous marriages. The pair only ended up staying there for less than a month, according to Zaitzeff: “Their staff probably used it way more than they did.” The couple didn’t end up buying.
Buying your way into a “good” school district is a grand (and fraught) New York City tradition, but sometimes it’s renting your way in while you wait to buy. “You’re going to overpay for the rental, because what’s your alternative? Paying $65,000 in a year in private school,” Michelle Griffith, a real-estate agent with Douglas Elliman, recently said of this type of client. But even with private schools, location matters, too, because it’s just easier living close by: Last year, she had a potential buyer with three girls at the same private school on the Upper East Side. He had been looking to purchase a condo in the neighborhood with financing but ultimately held off because of current mortgage rates: “It didn’t make sense” to buy, she says. After losing out on a four-bedroom rental that was asking for $40,000 a month, the client ended up signing a lease on a three-bedroom for $35,000 a block away from their school. “You need that convenience,” Griffith says.
In 2023, a hedge-fund manager signed a $25,000-a-month lease for a two-bedroom apartment at 150 Charles. At the time, the hedge fund was just a few years old and the manager was making a couple million dollars a year. But he also was pretty sure he’d be able to afford something properly grand if he waited a little longer, according to Compass broker Adrian Radomski, who represented the owner on the lease. “He knew that he was about to start making real money,” Radomski says. A two-bedroom, it seems, wouldn’t cut it in the long term for a princeling of finance. “You need at least a three-bedroom.” Another reason for renting versus buying? He wasn’t staying there long enough to justify the closing costs, taxes, and other fees that come with a multimillion-dollar purchase. “Two years is often not enough to see good appreciation,” Radomski says. “So these are some of the equations that people are running through their heads.”
People have affairs all the time, and some of them can afford bonus apartments for their trysts. (Per the New York Times, a “pied affaire.”) One broker tells me that around 2018, they worked on a rental involving a hedge-funder who leased a $20,000 penthouse in West Chelsea for his mistress, which he handled through a business LLC. “Guys, they do it all the time,” the broker says.