An heir to a liquor fortune may have something to toast if a sale goes according to plan.
Affordable housing developer Eli Bronfman, whose family controlled the Seagram Co. for decades, has listed his SoHo penthouse for $45 million, a hefty 25% premium over the $36 million he paid just three years ago, according to an ad that appeared Monday and data in the city register.
The four-level, 6,800-square-foot spread, which sits atop a 10-unit boutique condo in a cast-iron elevator building, features three bedrooms, a large column-lined library and a primary suite with multiple doors onto terraces. Also included is 2,800 square feet of outdoor space, the centerpiece of which is a private roof deck on the building’s eighth floor that has an outdoor kitchen and a dining area.
The apartment has drawn business-world bigwigs before, the register shows. One previous owner was hotel landlord Ed Scheetz; another was early WeWork investor Sam Ben-Avraham. In 2022 Bronfman bought the penthouse from Ben-Avraham, who also operates a trade-show business that has hosted fashion houses, in an off-market deal.
But Bronfman is using more conventional channels to market the home this time around; it’s listed with the brokerage Compass.
For his part, Bronfman serves as managing partner of Lincoln Avenue Capital, an affordable housing development company founded with his brother Jeremy in 2016. Its subsidiary Lincoln Avenue Communities owns and operates 155 affordable housing complexes encompassing 27,000 units in 28 states, according to a fall press release, though New York does not appear to be one of them.
The brothers’ grandfather, billionaire Edgar Bronfman Sr., and his brother Charles ran the family company Seagram from the 1970s to the 1990s—a period that saw it diversify into orange juice and oil—before Edgar’s son Edgar Bronfman Jr. became CEO in 1994. But the family shed its longtime beverage business after a rocky $30 billion merger with French conglomerate Vivendi in 2000.
Another of Edgar Sr.’s sons, Matthew, is the father of Eli and Jeremy. A private equity executive who has invested in U.S. and Israeli companies, Matthew currently is a member of the board of governors for Hillel International, a network of campus social groups for Jewish students.
Manhattan’s luxury real estate sector, or the top 10% of all deals, finished 2024 on a high note. Its median sale price in the fourth quarter was $6.5 million, up 13% in a year, according to data from the firm Douglas Elliman. But apartments in that lofty range sold at an average discount of 9% of their last asking price, the brokerage reported.
Clayton Orrigo, one of the Compass agents with the listing, did not return an email for comment. And a phone message left for Bronfman at his Fifth Avenue office also went unreturned.
