Itâs the era of superlatives for trophy properties in Manhattan. Not a day seems to go by without a new contender for the largest, tallest or priciest.  But all the hype canât obscure one possibly inconvenient truth: Fancy new developments may be trading at unheard-of values â pushing up against the $100 million mark â but resale apartments in white-glove buildings often struggle.  From uptown co-ops to downtown condos, these multimillion-dollar homes have missed out on the bidding wars more common among lower-cost apartments. Some havenât even been able to make asking price.  Others have not sold until they were discounted by as much as 25 percent, according to an analysis of sales data, and in some cases even those kinds of cuts have not done the trick, casting a big shadow on rosy market outlooks.  The markdowns may suggest that interest in trophies has ebbed, but some brokers say the cuts have been necessitated by sellers who are way too ambitious in their pricing; this would make the phenomenon less about overall conditions than specific mistakes. These sellers, convinced that the trophy market is boundless, and that the bench of overseas billionaires looking for a piece of New York is deep, are wildly miscalculating.  âThere is a perception that you can put anything on the market, that people will come along and buy it,â said Robby Browne, a broker with the Corcoran Group, who has been asked by sellers to put apartments on the market at what he said were unrealistic prices.  âWhatâs fueling the perception is that there have been so many high trades,â Mr. Browne said. âBut there are not as many of these trades as people think.â  Brokers liken what is happening to a âkeeping up with the Jonesesâ effect, or more precisely the Rybolovlevs â as in Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev and his eldest daughter, Ekaterina. Through a trust linked to Ekaterina, the Rybolovlevs two years ago paid $88 million for a 10-room penthouse at 15 Central Park West, or $13,000 a square foot, which at the time was a record.  After that deal, which closed in February 2012, a fever seemed to overcome sellers, who were suddenly convinced that their homes could command nosebleed-level prices, brokers said.  âThat really wasnât a fair comp,â or comparable price, to use to value a unit, said Richard J. Steinberg, a broker with Warburg Realty. âBut unfortunately, every seller of every co-op and every condo in the city started using that as their base line.â  And Mr. Steinberg knows firsthand about unrealistic expectations.  In the spring, he listed a four-bedroom unit at 770 Park Avenue, a prewar co-op on the Upper East Side, at $23.8 million. But it didnât get many bites, so he slashed the price by 25 percent in mid-September. At $17.9 million, he said, âweâre seeing double the amount of traffic through the apartment.â  Looking at the complete price history of Mr. Steinbergâs listing reinforces the idea that the âRybolovlev effectâ amounts to about 25 percent. In 2011, before the $88 million sale closed, the same 770 Park apartment was priced at $18 million, with Sothebyâs International Realty, so in a sense it is currently listed back where it was valued before the game-changing transaction at 15 Central Park West.  It is clear that the stratosphere of the market â those homes for $3 million or more, or the top 10 percent â has been sluggish, at least relative to the bottom, according to an analysis by Miller Samuel, the appraisal firm.  Since January 2012, 56 percent of the listings in this top category sold below the final asking price; 19 percent sold for the original list price; and 25 percent sold above the final asking price, the data show. In contrast, in the bottom 90 percent of sales, the number of properties that sold for less than their final asking price was just 2 percent.  Along the same lines, the top 10 percentâs absorption rate â the number of months it would take to sell all the inventory at the current pace of sales â was slow, too. It stood at almost nine months in the third quarter of this year, compared with three months for the rest of the market, the data show.  This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:  An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the purchase of the $88 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West in 2012. It was bought by a trust set up Dmitri Rybolovlev for his daughter Ekaterina and her heirs; it was not bought by Mr. Rybolovlev. The article also described incorrectly the circumstances of the purchase. It was bought for âsuccession planning,â according to Mr. Rybolovlev, not to shield assets in the divorce from his wife, Elena, as she has contended in divorce documents.
Owners of resale apartments in Manhattanâs white-glove buildings expecting to match the soaring prices of new condos have found they were aiming too high.