Pbenjay's Blog

For years I’ve been telling my son, who is an actor and lives in Los Angeles to come EAST!  I truly believe he would have more opportunities right here in Manhattan.  Theater roles abound and as we all know most of the truly GREAT actors come back to Broadway periodically to hone their skills.  When you act in a play, you must embody the role and stay in character for hours at a time!  When you act in a movie, you do scenes totally unrelated to the sequence of events and you are afforded the opportunity to do it over and over again until you get it right.

Now that I’ve put my unbiased opinion out there, I thought I’d back it up (sort of) with some 2014 New York City celebrity real estate facts.  The following information was gleaned from an article in Curbed:

Below are a few of the celebrities involved in real estate transaction in 2014.  I’ve listed just 12 but there are more; Perhaps tomorrow…

Manhattanites

1. ROBERT DE NIRO – $125,000/MONTH Robert De Niro may be short, but he plays big when it comes to real estate. In September the actor rented the most expensive apartment (steel magnate Leroy Schecter’s 35th-floor combo) in the city’s most expensive building, 15 Central Park West. Part of the combo was formerly rented by disgraced baseball star Alexander Rodriguez. De Niro’s rent? Oh, $125,000/month.

2. TOM BRADY/GISELE BUNDCHEN – $40,000/MONTH Obscenely gorgeous couple Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen want to rent out their New York City pied-a-terre. Of course, the full-floor three-bedroom is located on the 47th floor of a previously scandal-plagued skyscraper on Madison Square Park, cost $14 million when they bought it, and can be leased for $40,000 per month (plus an extra $2,500 for furniture picked out by a star quarterback and a supermodel).

3. JANET JACKSON – $35,000/MONTH Janet Jackson’s ornate three-bedroom, 3.5 bathroom spread on the 34th floor of Columbus Circle’s Trump International tower came up for lease in early February, asking $35,000/month. It rented three days later.

4. KIRSTEN DUNST – $12,500/MONTH The star of Spider-Man put her lovely, fully furnished two-bedroom penthouse on the Tribeca/Hudson Square border on the rental market in September, asking $12,500/month. Yeah, someone snatched that up.

5. PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – $10,500/MONTH The West Village two-bedroom apartment formerly occupied by the late great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who tragically died at home earlier this year in a drug-related incident, entered the rental market in March asking $10,500/month. It leased one day later.

6. LAUREN BACALL – $26M Beautiful starlet Lauren Bacall passed away this year at the age of 89, and subsequently, her nine-room, Central Park-facing apartment at the Dakota entered the real estate market for the first time in decades. Bacall bought it back in 1961 for a couple of tens of thousands of dollars (reports vary from between $28,000 and $48,000), and it’s now asking $26,000,000.

7. SPIKE LEE – $24.5M This year, anti-gentrification pundit Spike Lee officially put his incredibly historic Upper East Side townhouse on the market. He bought the 8,292-square-foot home from Jasper Johns (yes, that one) in 1998 for $16.6 million. In January, he wanted $32 million. In April, the price came down to $28.5M, and we got another look inside via different photos. In June, the ask dropped even further, to $24.5M. Maybe history and celebrity don’t help when the house is this pricey?

8. JENNIFER LOPEZ – $20.2M Though the deed doesn’t have the name to prove it, but an LLC intead, the buyer of The Whitman’s absolutely bonkers penthouse facing Madison Square Park (personal putting green included) is reportedly Jenny From The Block herself. At The Whitman, which only has four apartments but a lot of star power, Lopez would live above Chelsea Clinton and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon. The price? $20,161,350.

9. TAYLOR SWIFT – $20M And the biggest sale of the year goes to the queen of the pop music scene, Ms. Taylor Swift. She dropped $20 million on Lord of the Ring’s director Peter Jackson’s 8,300-square-foot Tribeca penthouse, which came with 6,000 square feet of outdoor space. The heavily beamed space aside, it apparently “sounds like it was decorated like a serial killer.” For one thing, she has personalized candles that say “Taybeca” inside of Tribeca. Tay-Tay, welcome to New York.

10. SARAH JESSICA PARKER/MATTHEW BRODERICK – $20M Celebrity real estate power couple Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick cut the asking price of their Greenwich Village townhouse… all the way down to $19.95 million. The 25-foot-wide, seven-fireplace home, which the couple renovated but apparently never lived in, was asking as much as $25 million at one point, but it’s now veering dangerously close to the $19 million they paid in 2011.

11. DEEPAK CHOPRA – $14.5M Joining Leonardo DiCaprio at the health-obsessed Delos building in the Village is holistic health and New Age guru Deepak Chopra, who spent $14.5 million for a 3,663-square-foot 3BR/2.5BA home.

12. BRUCE WILLIS – $13M Back at the Upper West Side celebrity magnet, the El Dorado, action star Bruce Willis put his three-bedroom on the market for $13 million—and found a buyer in less than a week. Willis and his model wife bought the place less than two years ago for $8.695M from U2 bassist Adam Clayton, but they’ve apparently given it a renovation since then. More photos? Over here.

New Yorkers are notoriously blasé about celebrity sightings and even more disinterested in where they live.  Additionally most real estate brokerage firms agree not to disclose where their celebrity clients purchased or rented; That’s why this information primarily deals with the properties sold and rented.