The richest New Yorkers buy and sell their homes in secret

Welcome to the Twilight Zone of real estate, where everything and nothing is for sale all at once.

When Manhattan’s ritziest new mansions in the sky hit the market at 220 Central Park South, there was no fanfare. There were no lavish broker parties or full-page ads in the New York Times. In fact, nobody even knew that the apartments inside architect Robert A.M. Stern’s 953-foot-tall urban country club were up for grabs — except for a group of insiders.

With an exclusive air more like a moneyed Fifth Avenue co-op than a new-development Midtown condo, the building’s developer, Steve Roth, selected each prospective resident by hand. The Vornado chief turned away many eager and well-heeled buyers, according to a source close to the project. In spite of the strict vetting process and a slowing high-priced condo market, the building is now mostly sold.

The hedge funder Daniel Ochs, debt mogul Andrew Zaro and rocker Sting jumped at the chance to become one of the chosen. But it was Citadel CEO Ken Griffin who spent most lavishly, obliterating the record for most expensive home sold in America with his $238 million penthouse purchase there in January.

“If you want to get someone’s attention with a whisper, scream!” says Leonard Steinberg, of the brokerage Compass. “220 [Central Park South] was the loudest whisper I have ever heard in my life. People feel like they are buying into a club that is word-of-mouth only and for ‘people like us.’ That has value for them.”

Even though, largely speaking, New York’s real estate market has become a democratic free-for-all thanks to listing websites like StreetEasy, Trulia and Realtor.com, the city’s toniest addresses are increasingly unadvertised and inaccessible — even to mere millionaires.

Of the 43 New York homes that sold for more than $20 million in 2018, 21 were not formally on the market at the time of their sales, according to Compass data.

Many sellers have confidentiality concerns. “When I got it, this was one of the few last unmolested open lofts left,” says an anonymous seller, who is relying on the deep Rolodex of broker Robert Dankner to sell his $10 million Flatiron District apartment — once owned by Rolling Stones photographer Ken Regan — without publicly listing it for sale. “It’s an unusual animal, and I don’t want it to pop up on StreetEasy.” (Dankner set a Greenwich Village record by whisper-selling a townhouse for $37.2 million.) Adds the seller, “My privacy is very important to me and I don’t need to know my neighbors or business associates to know what I am selling.”

There’s no way to count how many “whisper listings,” or “pocket listings,” exist in Manhattan at a given time. And because the rich are likely to think of their residence as an asset rather than a family home, pretty much every ritzy apartment in New York is available for a quiet sale if the price is right.

“I had a client from Goldman Sachs and he wanted to rent a specific home in the Hamptons near Coopers Beach,” says a New York-based concierge who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “But that home wasn’t for rent or for sale.”

Although she is not a real estate broker, the concierge acted quickly and discreetly. She drove to the home and looked in the mailbox to see who lived there. The owner was none other than Janna Bullock, the controversial Russian socialite who allegedly embezzled $200 million. The concierge reached out; Bullock bounced to her other Hamptons mansion after receiving a $600,000 check for the summer rental. The concierge took a cut.

Disgrace, bankruptcy and divorce are other common causes of whisper sales.

When Harvey Weinstein was forced to unload his four-story, 5,000-square-foot West Village townhouse, the deal was handled with discretion. Only an elite group of bidders had the opportunity to buy the tarnished asset. And last year, an anonymous buyer shelled out $25.6 million, $10.6 million more than Weinstein paid. What a boon for a disgraced mogul — no wonder the new owner hid.

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Not all whisper sales, however, result in such tidy sums. In fact, rather than reveal their addresses, many privacy-obsessed sellers would rather take a loss. In some cases, they overpaid and don’t want their friends and colleagues to know that they lost money on the sale. It drives some brokers crazy.

“If you talk to anybody but the top-tier brokers, they’ll tell you that they hate whisper listings,” because they take longer to sell and typically command lower prices, says Douglas Elliman broker Noble Black. “It’s very inefficient. A lot of brokers don’t even know about those listings. But those unknown brokers can bring serious clients to the table.”

Some clients of Brown Harris Stevens broker Paula Del Nunzio, who sold a local whisper listing for $50 million, have another reason.

“What I hear a lot of is, ‘I don’t want our child to know that we are looking to sell until they finish boarding school,’ ” says Del Nunzio. “They would go wide with it, but they don’t want to distress their child.”

Regardless of the stated reason, it’s undeniable that buying and selling a pricey property openly can be taboo in these sensitive times.

“There has been this phenomenal growth in the socialist movement,” Compass’ Steinberg told The Post earlier this year. “You don’t want to be identified as a person with a tremendous level of wealth.”