The $72 Million ‘Vertical Mansion’ on Wooster Street

Jeff Greene has had a rough go of it at 62 Wooster Street. The developer and failed Senate candidate bought the Soho cast-iron building in 2011 for just over $26 million. The plan was to convert the property into boutique condos and make around $110 million in sales. That hasn’t really worked out. So far, Greene has only managed to sell two of the building’s seven loft apartments after steep price cuts. He even failed to attract a buyer for his personal duplex penthouse, which comes with a lap pool and landscaped terrace, when he listed that in 2024. In late May, he seems to have attempted a Hail Mary offering: He bundled his penthouse and the two full-floor lofts below it, all of which total 18,600 square feet, and called it a “private vertical estate.” The asking is $72 million. Is three lofts somehow better than one?

Jorge Lopez, the Mundi Group founder who has the listing, naturally thinks the sale is a fantastic opportunity. “Honestly, it’s such a good offering,” he tells me. Why bundle the lofts this way? Supply and demand, per Lopez. After the building’s fourth-floor loft was listed in mid-May for around $19 million, several prospective buyers apparently asked if there was more space available in the building — thus the “vertical mansion.” “I’m telling you, there’s more requests for that than the full floor so far,” Lopez says. Plus, buyers collect units in the same building all the time. The interested parties are more or less who you’d expect: tech, finance, and real-estate people. (“Who’d want it is an Elon Musk–type,” one broker tells me. “He could have a compound with his 100 children there.”)

Douglas Elliman broker John Gomes, whose listings with the Eklund-Gomes team tend to start in the eight figures, says the current market is also particularly well suited to this kind of trophy property. “The super-prime market has gone gangbusters,” Gomes says. “The fact that this is a $72 million listing doesn’t surprise me.” Three years ago, Gomes and Fredrik Eklund sold a 10,000-square-foot duplex penthouse at 151 Wooster for $50 million. And at 421 Broome, an 8,000-square-foot penthouse with six terraces and a lot of marble sold in 2021 for $49 million. (That penthouse’s previous owners once said they decided to sell after the yearslong renovation because property was “too big.”)

And packaging languishing properties is a fairly common tactic, brokers say. A year after a 2014 deal to sell Mary Joan Wilder’s eight units in a Park Avenue co-op to Aby Rosen fell through, Wilder partnered with the building’s two other shareholders and had Corcoran’s Kane Manera list all 10 apartments for $65 million as a “megamansion.” “You bunch them all together because maybe someone wants them all,” he says. In the end, though, the megamansion pitch was a bust — Wilder eventually sold her apartments in July 2022 to a pair of LLCs.

So let’s agree it’s a good time to be a billionaire looking to pick up a penthouse or two. (Isn’t it always?) But 18,600 square feet of real estate that requires a major renovation to combine? And all to own a chunk of a building that counts among its amenities a bike room and storage and places its owner squarely in range of midwestern tourists waiting to get into the Sloomoo Institute?

Obviously, the 62 Wooster package has its skeptics. And they say buyers who can afford the $72 million ask may not want to deal with a renovation of this scale. “People want to move in with their toothbrush,” says Serhant’s Peter Zaitzeff. “They don’t want to move in with headaches and work.” Others smelled a marketing stunt — not that there’s anything wrong with that. “People are going to talk about this real estate when it’s at this price point, so they’ve done their job,” says Manera, who had the Park Avenue package deal. “If this doesn’t reap the rewards in the short term, they’ll be able to pivot and get something out of it.”

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