An Upper East Side penthouse co-op that belonged to a billionaire owner of office buildings is now in the hands of a developer of shopping centers.
The late Sam Zell’s three-bedroom apartment has been sold to Urban Edge Properties CEO Jeffrey Olson for $10.8 million, according to tax records that hit the city register Tuesday.
The unit contains a living room with a fireplace and doors to a wraparound terrace, an eat-in kitchen and a library in a prewar co-op on Fifth Avenue that faces the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Past and present occupants of the high-rise at East 82nd Street have included architect Rafael Vinoly, real estate marketing executive Louise Sunshine and office landlord Berndt Perl, property records show.
Officially the seller was the Samuel Zell Administrative Trust, whose trustee is listed as Chai Trust Co., the Zell family’s investment arm, records show. Chai’s president, Scott Peppet, is married to Zell’s daughter Kellie, according to news reports. Meanwhile, Olson and his wife, Amy, closed May 1, the register shows.
The penthouse has lingered since being listed at $12.5 million in October 2023, five months after the death of Zell at the age of 81. Bouncing on and off the market for the past two years, according to StreetEasy, the penthouse finally went into contract in January for about 15% less than sought. But the marketing period did overlap with an extensive façade project that left the unit’s 15-story, 56-unit building enshrouded in netting, a possible explanation for its struggle to find a taker. It’s not clear from the register what Zell or related entities paid for the apartment.
Zell, who is credited with having invented the public real estate investment trust in 1968 with his co-founding of the company Equity Group Investments, was probably best known in recent years for a single blockbuster sale. In 2007, just before the real estate market tanked and touched off the Great Recession, he unloaded 500-site office building owner Equity Office Properties to asset management giant Blackstone in a leveraged buyout deal valued at $39 billion.
Blackstone immediately broke up the portfolio and began selling off its parts, including eight New York sites, such as Midtown’s Worldwide Plaza, to Macklowe Properties for $7 billion. Macklowe later failed to retire the debt used for the heavily leveraged transaction and was forced to surrender almost his entire purchase to lender Deutsche Bank.
For its part, Urban Edge dates to 2015, when Vornado Realty Trust spun off 85 East Coast sites, almost all of them strip malls, into a new company. Since then Olson has served as CEO of Urban Edge, whose city holdings include Kingswood Crossing, a Target-anchored shopping center in the Midwood neighborhood. All in, the publicly traded firm today owns 74 properties totaling 17.3 million square feet, according to a stock filing from this month.
Allison Koffman and Juliette Janssens, the agents with Sotheby’s International Realty who represented both the seller and the buyer in the penthouse transaction, had no comment by press time. And a phone message left for Olson at Urban Edge went unreturned.
