High-rises, high prices
With luxury penthouses in Los Angeles, developers pursue the ultra-wealthy buyer.
IF you want a killer condo in L.A., the stakes are getting higher. Several über-luxe penthouses are defying the gravitational pull of the housing market and redefining the meaning of luxury.
Mostly new, they are set atop buildings awash in every service and amenity imaginable and target the ultra-wealthy multi-property owner more concerned with maintaining an upscale lifestyle than the cost of it.
Prices for these ultimate residences, up to $30 million, sound fantastical amid the gloom and doom of the rest of the market. But analysts say that this uppermost end -- properties $5 million and up -- is one of the few bright spots on the horizon.
"The multimillion-dollar luxury housing market held up much better than the overall market in 2007," said Andrew Le- Page, a market analyst at DataQuick Information Systems. "There was no evidence the rich were getting poorer."
"This is in that rarefied air, where the buyers are shopping in Paris, Rome and L.A.," said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist at the California Assn. of Realtors. "They are much more immune to the rest of the market."
Because penthouses usually afford the best views, builders are seeing their value and increasingly offering them as one-of-a-kind trophy properties -- a twist for a part of a building historically intended as servants' quarters and storage units for excess furnishings.
To attract penthouse buyers, developers of new high-end buildings are vying to create and market their units as the ultimate in luxury, exclusivity and individuality.
And with a high-rise boom going on downtown and other buildings sprouting along the Wilshire Corridor and in the Mid-Wilshire areas, the bar for "luxury" is rising and prices along with it.
Kerry Marsico, a Coldwell Banker Realtor in Los Feliz who has been selling property in downtown high-rises for the last three years, has noticed a significant change in his clientele. There are now more wealthy buyers in the mix.
"There have been lofts downtown for a while," he said, "but this luxury option wasn't there."
Some high-end developers are unabashedly seeing this as the ultimate one-upmanship challenge.
"We wanted to build something incomparable in Los Angeles," said David J. Wine, vice chairman of Related LP, developer of the Century, a new 42-story luxury high-rise set on the former site of the St. Regis Hotel in Century City. "Estate living in a high-rise."
