The New York Rangers may have had a disappointing season, but their center has scored big with a home sale in the West Village.
Mika Zibanejad has sold a 3,400-square-foot townhouse on West 12th Street for $13 million, according to a deed that appeared Monday in the city register.
The hockey star’s haul represents about a 30% premium. Indeed, in 2022 Zibanejad paid $9.7 million for the renovated five-level dwelling, which has six bedrooms, three and a half baths and a top-floor primary suite with a laundry area, based on advertising materials.
The 19-foot-wide, Greek Revival-style site, in a historic district between Greenwich Avenue and West Fourth Street, appears to have been shopped around as a “whisper” listing, in that it wasn’t publicly marketed, a tactic historically used by attention-shunning celebrities.
The townhouse went into contract March 24, about three weeks before the Rangers were eliminated from playoff contention for the first time since 2021. Zibanejad finished with 20 goals, his lowest season total since he joined the team in 2016, when he had 14 goals. But Zibanejad played in only 56 games that first year in New York versus 82 games in the season that ended last month, based on National Hockey League statistics.
The buyer of the red-brick 1854 property was a trust in the name of Lara Hejtmanek, a digital marketing executive currently serving as managing director of the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center, an in-house tech incubator at Columbia University’s business school. The center provides students who demonstrate promising startup ideas with up to $75,000 in seed money, according to the organization’s website.
Hejtmanek did not return an email for comment by press time. And Ryan Kaplan, the Corcoran Group agent who represented both sides of the townhouse transaction, also did not immediately respond to an email.
As for Zibanejad’s next move, it is not immediately clear what it will be. Rangers General Manager Chris Drury reportedly recently considered trading Zibanejad, who is in the third year of an eight-year contract worth about $9 million annually. But Zibanejad, who has a “no movement” clause baked into his contract that allows him to reject trade moves, has said he plans to stay in the city until his contract expires in 2030.
“My focus has always been here. My focus has never been on anything else,” Zibanejad told The New York Times in January. Before being selected as a first-round draft pick in 2011 by the Ottawa Senators, Zibanejad played for teams in his native Sweden.
