Corcoran Sunshine takes over sales at Vanke’s 100 East 53rd Street

Team joins troubled Midtown condos with 60% of units sold

Corcoran Sunshine Takes Over Sales at Vanke’s Midtown Condos

Corcoran's Kelly Kennedy Mack and 100 East 53rd Street (Hines, Mack via Michael McWeeney)

Sheridan Wall

Oct 5, 2023, 10:52 AM

Corcoran Sunshine is now heading sales at Vanke’s troubled Midtown condo.

The team, led by Michele Hinojos and Jad Cary, is replacing Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing at 100 East 53rd Street, dubbed the Selene.

The building is nearly 60 percent sold between closed and in-contract deals, according to Corcoran Sunshine.

Corcoran’s new development division is the third brokerage tapped by the Chinese developer, who initially partnered with Aby Rosen on the 63-story tower.

Rosen sued Vanke in 2020, arguing the firm’s U.S. arm arranged a “backdoor deal” that landed it “on both sides of the borrower-lender relationship without RFR’s consent.” In response to the lawsuit, Vanke sought to remove Rosen from the project and accused him of attempting to “extract an exorbitant buyout.”

The developer duo launched sales in 2019 with Compass leading the charge along with RFR’s in-house brokerage. Compass, led by Leonard Steinberg, quit the project in 2020 amid Vanke and Rosen’s infighting.

“Unfortunately, the developer’s pricing aspirations combined with Covid and ownership disputes were not aligned with market conditions,” Steinberg told The Real Deal at the time.

The developer relaunched sales last May with Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing as the exclusive broker at the building, which had at that point only sold 28 of its 94 units.

Along with a new sales team, Vanke also slashed prices at the tower. The developer cut the asking price of its 6,800-square-foot penthouse down from $65 million to $35 million and dropped the price of its 10th-floor “garden mansion” from $30 million to $20 million.

While at the helm, the Brown Harris Stevens team sold 25 units in what the firm’s managing director, Robin Schneiderman, called “a challenging market and submarket” and following two years of paused sales.

The team also organized partnerships with designer Mathieu Lehanneur and the on-site restaurant Le Jardinier.

“The same assets we directed are still being used to market the property today which is a testament to the outstanding work performed by the entire team,” Schneiderman wrote in a statement.

Prices at the building start at $1.8 million for a studio. A three-bedroom, 3,400-square-foot unit is the most expensive on the market with an asking price of $9.8 million.

Amenities at the tower also include a pool, fitness center, sauna and clubroom.

New York