Sherry-Netherland Co-op That Sold for $67.5M Now in Contract at $12M

A full-floor co-op at the Sherry-Netherland, the prewar hotel-residence at 781 Fifth Avenue, has gone into contract for $12 million, a fraction of the $67.5 million an entity tied to exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui paid for it in 2015, the New York Post reported. City transfer tax records confirm the original price, making the drop one of the most heavily documented resale losses in Manhattan co-op history.

Why it matters

The sale is being cited as the highest-profile example of a broader repricing at the Sherry-Netherland, where the Post reports maintenance charges have nearly doubled per square foot since 2016 and buyers are increasingly steering toward newer condominiums with fewer board restrictions. New York City’s own ACRIS real property transfer tax filings corroborate the price at the center of that argument: a March 2015 filing, recorded under CRFN 2015000103194, shows Genever Holdings LLC paying a stated $67,500,000 for the 18th-floor unit, with the seller listed as Sherry 1800s LLC. “This will be the largest loss on an individual residential sale on record in New York City. Nothing comes close to $50 million,” appraiser Jonathan Miller told the Post.

The numbers

Against that confirmed $67.5 million baseline, the reported $12 million contract price represents a $55.5 million loss, an 82 percent decline over 11 years on the roughly 7,000-square-foot unit, among the largest in the building. The Post cited other apartments in the same building moving at similarly steep discounts, including a unit that sold for $11.1 million in 2011 now listed at $1.6 million, and pointed to rising per-square-foot maintenance, from $6.67 in 2016 to $12.15 today, as a structural driver rather than a one-off. Guo Wengui, later convicted in a $1 billion fraud scheme and sentenced to 30 years in prison earlier this year, was arrested at the apartment by federal agents in 2023.

What’s next

The $12 million deal has not yet closed, and neither the Post nor city records show a closing date. The building’s board still has to approve any buyer under its co-op bylaws, a step that has slowed other sales in New York’s prewar co-op stock even as prices fall, a dynamic also playing out at a 50-year-family-held Upper East Side corner that only found a buyer last month after sitting untraded for decades.