A top executive at BlackRock has put his Upper West Side spread on the market.
Mark McCombe, a vice chairman at the asset management giant, and his wife, Kristina, have listed their nearly 5,000-square-foot duplex condo on West End Avenue for about $7 million, according to an ad that appeared last week.
The six-bedroom home, a combination of five units merged by a previous owner, features a 48-foot-long living and dining room, a primary suite with an en-suite dressing room and study, and a pantry that has a 150-bottle wine refrigerator. It sits in a prewar building near Riverside Park at West 89th Street.
In 2015 the McCombes paid $7.5 million for the two-level apartment, or only slightly more than the current asking price, another example of the residential market failing to surpass the peak of the last market cycle.
Still April showed gains in sales activity across the board, a trend that stands in opposition to national markets that continue to be frozen by high interest rates. Analysts have attributed the uptick to New York’s having more cash buyers than other cities.
Perhaps to hedge their bets, perhaps, the McCombes have enlisted not one but two brokerages to help sell the property, Brown Harris Stevens and Douglas Elliman. Elliman’s Josh Rubin did not return an email by press time, and Brown Harris’s Lisa Lippman had no comment. And a BlackRock spokesman also had no comment.
McCombe, who joined BlackRock in 2011 after serving as the CEO for Asian markets at HSBC, today handles global client relations for BlackRock and is also one of the four executives who make up the company’s influential Office of the Chairman that shapes corporate strategy with CEO and co-founder Larry Fink.
BlackRock has been shedding some assets too. This spring it sold nearly 2 million shares in Empire State Building landlord Empire State Realty Trust reportedly over concerns the skyscraper’s tourist traffic is set to dip. But BlackRock still owns 15 million shares in the Malkin-family-led trust.
At the same time, the Hudson Yards-based firm, which employs nearly 23,000 workers worldwide, recently issued orders to its hundreds of managing directors that they are expected to work in the office five days a week.
Other BlackRock executives have been making moves on the home front as well. Last month a trust linked to firm co-founder Robert Kapito picked up a Fifth Avenue co-op from Democratic power brokers the Bergreen family for $13 million.
