Bank Forecloses On $50 M 'Billionaires' Row' Apartment: Report

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — A luxury apartment unit which sold for more than $50 million at glitzy One57 — the West 57th Street "Billionaires' Row" tower — has been foreclosed on and will be sold at auction this month, financial news outlet Bloomberg first reported.

Apartment 79 at One57 will be auctioned off on July 19, Bloomberg reported. The auction may set a new record for the priciest foreclosure in New York City real estate history.

"It’s probably the most-expensive foreclosure we’ve ever seen in luxury development," Donna Olshan, president of Olshan Realty Inc., told Bloomberg, "I don’t know of a foreclosure that’s larger than that."

The unit was purchased by a shell group known as One57 79 Inc. in 2014 for $50.9 million, according to public real estate records. The transaction was financed by a $35.3 million mortgage from Banque Havilland — a private bank established in 2009 and headquartered in Luxembourg.

Apartment 79 at One57 is the second unit to be foreclosed on in the span of one month. Both apartments were the first on "Billionaires Row" — a group of suptertall luxury developments that sprung up on West 57th Street during a boom in New York's luxury real estate market — to be foreclosed on, Bloomberg reported.

One57 was built by Gary Barnett's Extell Development Company, which is currently developing the even taller Central Park Tower just one block away from One57 on West 57th Street. Construction of One57 ended in 2015 and Central Park Tower is expected to be completed in 2019, according to Extell Development's website.

Read Bloomberg's full article here.

Photo by Mark Lennihan/Associated Press