Seattle Luxury

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) — Bernard Madoff’s penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is under contract to be sold after almost five months on the market.
A contract was signed for an undisclosed price, Deputy U.S. Marshal Roland Ubaldo said in a telephone interview. The U.S. Marshals Service is in charge of the disposition of the property, a three-bedroom apartment at 133 East 64th St.
Madoff’s apartment has been on the market for 146 days, according to StreetEasy.com, a property listing service. The price was cut 10 percent in November to $8.9 million after an original listing for $9.9 million.
“Perched atop a distinguished white-glove prewar cooperative, this 9 into 7 room duplex penthouse affords spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline,” reads the apartment listing at Sotheby’s International Realty.
The sale will raise funds to repay victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Serena Boardman, the co-broker for the penthouse with Sotheby’s International Realty in New York, didn’t immediately return a phone call for comment. Sotheby’s co-broker Anne Corey also didn’t return a call.
The median price of Manhattan apartments slid 10 percent to $810,000 in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, according to New York appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Fourth-quarter sales of luxury apartments, defined as the top 10 percent by price, increased 8.3 percent from a year earlier to 247, the data from Miller Samuel and Prudential show. The median sales price fell 8.5 percent to $3.78 million.
Madoff, 71, pleaded guilty in March to 11 counts of fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to 150 years.
The Marshals Service is also selling a home seized from Madoff in Palm Beach, Florida. Madoff’s former home in Montauk, New York, near the summer resort communities of the Hamptons, sold for $9.41 million. The asking price was $8.75 million.
Steven Roth, the chairman of Vornado Realty Trust, bought that property, according to the Wall Street Journal.