Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Getty

Just about everyone can agree that it’s a bad time to be 432 Park. In the years since the New York Times published a damning story about the structural woes plaguing the ultra-high-end, super-tall — broken elevators, creaky walls, noisy trash chutes — there’s been a drip-drip of unpleasant details about the building along with a pair of lawsuits filed against the developers, CIM Group and Harry Macklowe. There are languishing eight-figure listings and embarrassing price cuts. And, oh, concerns about “concrete hand grenades.” What was once marketed as a frictionless life on Billionaire’s Row now appears, at least from the outside, to be a bit of a mess. So what’s it like being a broker there? Well, it depends on who you ask.

“I hope I get ten more listings,” says Claire Groome, an agent with Sotheby’s. Earlier this month, Groome closed a sale at No. 432 for a two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath at just a hair shy of $8.7 million. “I had no problem selling,” she says of the property, which went for 17 percent below the initial listing price. “I had it on for less than six months, and I had several offers.” Groome raves about the “boutiquey” building. “The way it’s run — the staff are super, the concierge, they do everything for you,” she says. It’s got a great restaurant and “as opposed to all the other super-talls … there are some people who have apartments they use as pied-à-terres there, but there are a lot of people who live there.” What about the building’s PR issues? “All these super-talls have problems,” she says. “They just don’t all get the kind of press that 432 does.”

A fair enough point. Clients paying this kind of premium for their apartments are notoriously hard to please. And other towers along this glossy stretch of the West 50s have faced some public bruising over, say, neighboring buildings suing over construction damage. None, though, have anything close to the barrage of trouble that seems to follow the Rafael Viñoly–designed all-white 432 Park. “Every time we tried to show, there was some article that would be really negative about the elevators or the structure,” a former broker in the building tells me. “I’m so traumatized.” To this broker, the question seemed to be: How do you try to solicit a client’s highest and best offer when the image of an elevator stalled above the cloud line is somewhere in their heads? This person listed one unit a couple of times, and showings seemed to go well enough. Except, when the offers came in from the prospective buyers, they were invariably lowballs — sometimes nearly 40 percent below asking. “The sellers would get really anxious,” this broker says. ”They’re trying to list something that is just such a depreciating asset.”

Other agents who have done deals in the building said it’s not entirely a matter of lawsuits or bad press — there’s also just a lot of competition in the market right now. In the decade since sales opened up at 432 Park, more ultraluxury buildings have come online — Central Park Tower, 111 West 57th Street, and 220 Central Park South, to name a few. “Billionaire’s Row has recently been about what’s the latest and greatest,” says Abraham Sarway, a Douglas Elliman agent who was been on the buyer side of a sale at 432 last year and currently has the rental listing for the same unit Groome just sold.

Whatever the reason, 432 Park has been struggling lately: An UrbanDigs analysis of resales in 2024 and 2025 against the trio of aforementioned buildings found that 432’s apartments, on average, spent the longest time on the market (524 days) and had the highest discounts percentage (27.1 percent) and the lowest price per square foot ($3,617). “Resales at 432 Park Avenue are facing sustained pressure across every key metric,” UrbanDigs’s co-founder, John Walkup, says. Much of which points to another issue several brokers shared with me: Sellers have unrealistic expectations about what their condos are worth. “These people bought for crazy numbers,” one broker tells me. “It’s time to come back down to earth.”

So who is looking to live at 432 right now? Well-funded renters, for one. “People are fighting to get in,” says Compass’s Jason Haber, who has handled three rentals in the past few years. While Haber declined to share his clients’ backgrounds, the “traumatized” broker mentioned that executives splitting their time between New York and elsewhere liked 432 Park as an option for furnished, ultraluxury housing near their Manhattan offices — all on their company’s dime, of course. “They’re not fully aware,” this broker says. As for those who want to buy? Brokers tell me it’s often people who are already living there. They want more space or an apartment for their kids. There’s even been quite a few boomerangs, apparently. “A lot of the showings that I had for that listing were people who had already lived in the building who wanted to come back,” Groome says. “That’s just how great the building is.”

One seasoned broker who has handled deals in other towers on Billionaire’s Row had this to say: Just wait it out. “It’s too valuable not to be fixed,” they tell me. But right now, while the press is still bad and the lawsuits are still dragging, sellers should take a breath. Which is also what this broker is doing — they’ve declined all representation requests coming from 432. “It’s still too toxic,” they say.

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