Plenty of Manhattan apartments have views of Central Park, the Hudson River or the Empire State Building. But this $118.5 million penthouse has something truly unique.
"You can see Colorado from here!" real estate broker Ryan Serhant said, standing on the 40th-floor terrace overlooking the New Jersey highlands. "There's nothing else like it!"
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He's kidding—sort of. Serhant, one of the three stars of Bravo's popular show "Million Dollar Listing New York," was a boundless marketer while giving CNBC an exclusive tour of the penthouse in The Ritz-Carlton Residences in Battery Park City.
It's the newly anointed highest-priced apartment in downtown Manhattan. It boasts more than 15,000 square feet of indoor space with more than 2,000 square feet of terraces. The master bedroom has sweeping views of the Statue of Liberty, and the outdoor Jacuzzi faces One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building.
"From the south you see New York's past," Serhant said. "And to the north you see New York's future."
The offering is actually three contiguous apartments that take up the entire top two floors of the building. The largest of the three is a five-bedroom duplex measuring about 7,600 square feet. Another unit is a duplex with four bedrooms, and the third is a single unit with three bedrooms. The apartments are not being offered separately.
On a recent sunny morning, Serhant stood on the terrace of the main penthouse overlooking the harbor, with dozens of ferries and cargo ships cruising by. The jaw-dropping sticker price is actually "good value," he said.
First, Serhant explained, the apartment is asking about $7,600 per square foot. While that's high for most of Manhattan, the penthouse at the nearby Woolworth Building is asking $12,000 a square foot with its $110 million asking price. And top apartments in midtown or Central Park have been priced higher than $10,000 a square foot in the past.
Serhant said whoever buys the apartment would spend tens of millions more to combine, gut and renovate it. What the buyer is purchasing, he said, is the space and the views, which are both exceptional.
When asked if the price was simply a way to get attention to the property, Serhant said: "This apartment was going to turn heads no matter what we priced it at. Just because of the sheer size, the views, because of the finishes and because of what we are offering and because that's part of my job, as a real estate broker."
He added, "You also have to think about this apartment on a global scale. $118.5 [million] is a lot of money in NYC, in the U.S. and for 99.99 percent of the population. But if you look at some of the record sales in London, Hong Kong— we're up there but we're not going to be the most expensive that's ever been recorded, by far."
A $118.5 million bargain? Yes, only in Manhattan.
Bravo, like CNBC and CNBC.com, is owned by NBC Universal.
