Case Study 02
3 Lincoln Center
The Art of Deconstruction
Overview
Five combined condominiums spanning 8,600 square feet. A 40-seat screening room. A private gym. A professional kitchen. And a price tag no one would touch. After years of failed attempts by Manhattan's most prominent brokerages, Hope Street saw what others couldn't: the problem wasn't the apartment. It was the premise. By reversing the combination and selling individual units, we achieved more than the estate ever imagined.
Location
Lincoln Center, Manhattan
Type
Luxury Condominium Combination
Developer
Warner LeRoy Estate
Units
5 reconfigured residences
Pricing
$1.3M – $24M
"Everyone tried to sell it as one. We succeeded by making it five."
The Challenge
What we faced
Eccentric Configuration
The layout was built for one person with singular tastes — requiring buyers to ascend through a duplex only to descend again. It was architecture as autobiography, legible only to its creator.
Stratospheric Pricing
At $14 million, the combined unit entered a market segment where only a handful of comparable transactions existed on the entire Upper West Side. The price demanded conviction the market didn't feel.
Exhausted Market Credibility
The city's most recognized agents had each held the exclusive, rotating through firms over several years. The property had become synonymous with unsellability.
Estate Complexity
Navigating an estate sale added layers of legal complexity and emotional sensitivity that made conventional negotiation strategies insufficient.
The Approach
How we solved it
Reverse Engineering the Problem
Where others saw a single listing that wouldn't move, we saw five individual opportunities waiting to be unlocked. We engaged an architecture firm to revert each unit to its original offering plan layout — a creative solution that required minimal legal work since the units had never been formally combined for tax purposes.
Estate Partnership
We presented the estate with an approach none of their previous brokers had considered. After years of stagnation, the idea of deconstructing and selling individually was received with genuine enthusiasm and renewed optimism.
Digital First, Before It Was Standard
We created one of New York's first standalone property websites — marketing the apartments rather than our brand. This was a radical departure at a time when brokerage firm pages were the norm.
Results
5/5
Units Sold
First
Brokerage to Close Any Unit
>100%
Estate's Target Achieved
Conclusion
The Warner LeRoy Estate taught a lesson that has informed every project since: in real estate, the most creative solution is often the most profitable one. By questioning the fundamental assumption — that the apartment should be sold as-is — Hope Street generated returns that exceeded the estate's expectations and restored faith in a property the market had written off.