There were 166 transactions totaling $1.1 billion filed in New York City records in the 24 hours before 4 p.m. on Wednesday, May 6, 2026.
🏆 Commercial: The top commercial real estate transaction to hit records came from the Archdiocese of New York, which sold the ground lease for the Lotte New York Palace hotel at 455-457 Madison Avenue for $491.1 million to the Seoul-based operator of the luxury property to fund the settlements of the survivors of clergy sexual abuse. The sale also includes a two-story neighboring building at 35 East 50th Street.
🏆 Residential: The priciest home sale was in Greenwich Village, where Madison Realty Capital and City Urban Realty sold a penthouse at their luxury development at 16 Fifth Avenue for $32.5 million. The buyers were Hidden Costs, LLC and Hidden Costs 2, LLC. The unit, a duplex, spans more than 6,800 square feet, pricing the sale at roughly $4,800 per square foot. It has private outdoor space, five bedrooms and seven and a half bathrooms. Corcoran’s Ryan Kaplan and Tara King-Brown had the listing. The pad’s last asking price was $45 million.
📊 Residential: Jenica Paulson took over a townhouse at 9 East 86th Street in Carnegie Hill amid her divorce from billionaire hedge funder John Paulson. The deal valued the property at $30 million. John Paulson had purchased the home, built by banker William Woodward in the early 20th century, in 2004 for $14.7 million. The Paulsons in recent court filings agreed to settle their divorce case and dismiss Jenica Paulson’s case against her estranged husband, alleging fraud, according to Bloomberg.
📊 Commercial: RXR’s sale of a Clinton Hill development site hit records, closing for $121.4 million. The buyer was Yitzchok Schwartz’s YS Developers. The full-block site at 47 Hall Street spans 550,000 and last sold in 2016 for $161 million. The transaction works out to $221 per square foot. RXR planned to convert the property into luxury office space; YS intends to move forward with a mixed-use development with retail, apartments and self-storage space.
📊 Commercial: In Brooklyn Heights, a two-story retail property home to a Walgreens pharmacy at 120 Court Street traded for $30 million. The sellers of the 11,400-square-foot building were companies linked to Ken Segal, Maurice Setton and Jeffrey Sorkin. The buyer was a company managed by Abraham Waldman. The building was last sold in 2000.
By the Numbers: Manhattan’s top brokerages post $23.4 billion in sales last year as market heats up
Manhattan’s top residential brokerages in 2025 raked in more money across more deals, showing that in the Big Apple, the appetite for homes remained strong even in the face of geopolitical unrest, tariff concerns and elevated interest rates.
Overall, Manhattan’s top 25 brokerages (ranked by total sales volume) took in $23.4 billion in deals last year, up about 21 percent year over year, according to an analysis by TRD Data of on-market residential sales in city, MLS and agency records. Companies specializing in new development were excluded.
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