Ahead of their move from the coastal Southern California suburbs to Manhattan, a physician and her businessman husband went searching for suburbia in an Upper West Side condo this spring. Their must-haves were plentiful and perhaps unsurprising given their current lifestyle: a laundry room where they could spread out a drying rack; an office for her husband, who sometimes works 12-hour days with early-morning starts; and a guest room for visiting friends and relatives. Also, they had one young daughter and plans for a second child, and they wanted both kids to have their own room.
Their ideal home, it turned out, was an $8.9 million four-bedroom apartment at Extell’s 50 West 66th Street. The generous layout, the doctor says, meant they could divide it up, with “sophisticated” and “adult-focused” spaces such as the family room and dining room, and kids-designated areas strewn with toys for the little girl and her newborn sibling. “We didn’t look at too many places,” the doctor notes, although that wasn’t exactly by choice. “There weren’t that many options.”
The four-bedroom-plus luxury condo has long been just a sliver of the city’s new real-estate supply. Yet that is beginning to change. Even as new condo inventory has plummeted to its lowest level in more than a decade, developers have been stuffing as many of these massive layouts as they can into the projects they do build, aiming to win over affluent buyers who would prefer a McMansion in the sky over its functional equivalent in Westchester or Connecticut.
According to data from Marketproof, 10 percent of Manhattan and Brooklyn condo proposals accepted by the New York Attorney General’s Office since 2024—or 17 out of 171—have had apartment mixes where half or more of the units had four or more bedrooms. This is up sharply from less than 4 percent, or 28 out of 744, of the condo plans submitted between 2015 and 2023. This shift is especially pronounced in blue-chip neighborhoods, where, according to industry professionals who have worked on several new development projects, larger layouts are now king.
“People in these brackets have a lot of money, and they’re willing to pay for it,” says Donna Olshan, who tracks Manhattan’s luxury market. “If you can create square footage the size of a house and also have some amenities, it’s an alternative for them.”
You can see this trend clearly in developments like the Myles, the Grid Group’s 14-story boutique condo going up on West 21st Street in Chelsea, which began sales earlier this year. Eighteen of its 22 units were configured as either four- or five-bedrooms, and they are wrapped up with quite a few nice-to-haves that you would expect in a suburban Colonial home but are exceedingly rare in urban apartments, such as proper in-unit laundry rooms and built-out pantries with extra freezer drawers. Each residence gets a designated home-office space, while the fourth bedroom is tucked into its own wing with an en-suite bathroom, designed to house live-in staff or serve as a dedicated media room and play space for children.
“It really does almost feel like a suburban home,” acknowledges Corcoran’s Nicole Hechter, who is heading sales at the property. This sensibility is further accentuated by private parking downstairs and the fact that every unit also includes outdoor space equipped with a grill.
For Douglas Elliman’s Maya Kadouri, who serves as the director of sales at the new 60-unit Sky Equity Group development at 260 East 72nd Street, the pitch is similarly centered on scale. The Peter Pennoyer Architects–designed apartments feature classic layouts with spacious foyers and 10- to 11-foot ceilings that more or less echo the grand Park Avenue aesthetic, but with zero renovation required by the buyer.
When looking at the typical buyer for this sort of property, real estate experts point to a familiar demographic: youngish, well-to-do families working in the city with several kids attending private or top-tier public schools. This reflects the real way to flaunt wealth in a metropolis, which is simply having a large family and the space to support them. As Tina Fey memorably wrote in a 2011 essay for The New Yorker, four children named after kings and pieces of fruit are a way of saying that a household can comfortably afford a massive apartment and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual elementary-school tuition fees.
In the post-pandemic era, many parents in these families have been willing to pay a steep premium for peace and quiet—specifically, a room where they can close the door to work without interruption. “It’s like gold to be able to shut your door,” says Anna, who moved from the suburbs of Menlo Park, California, with her husband and teenagers into a $4 million four-bedroom condo at the newly converted 450 Washington. Her agent, Corcoran’s Marilyn Temiz, notes that she has increasingly noticed families outgrowing their three-bedroom homes, prompting developers to pay close attention to the shortage of larger floor plans.
Alongside 30- and 40-something financiers, corporate lawyers, and tech entrepreneurs are their parents. Real estate agents and brokerage analysts say that rather than downsizing from their expansive 6,000-square-foot suburban mansions or Upper East Side brownstones, this older cohort is looking to buy comparably sized spaces directly in the city. These new urban homes have enough room to accommodate children and grandchildren during the holidays while freeing them from the burdensome maintenance of a sprawling house.
“They’re used to space,” says Rachel Glazer of Brown Harris Stevens. “So if they can afford big apartments, they’re buying them.”
This demand may help explain why the giant-new-apartment trend is expanding beyond the traditional Upper East and West Sides and pushing downtown. In the past, buyers who wanted a large space outside of a townhouse had to navigate the multistep, often frustrating process of combining neighboring units and surviving strict co-op board approvals and extensive renovations.
“Whether or not their kids live uptown or downtown, I think they want to be able to enjoy the lifestyle components of downtown, the restaurants, the shopping, the retail,” says Charles Snyder, senior vice-president of research and analytics at Douglas Elliman. He adds that there is a growing cross-over demographic of families choosing downtown private schools over traditional uptown options, bringing buyers to neighborhoods that previously lacked large inventory.
The financial return for high-bedroom units in new developments can work out exceptionally well for builders and investors.
“Developers build what’s most economically feasible, and larger units are the secret sauce,” says Jonathan Miller, director of markets at StreetMatrix. While developers of rental buildings get a higher return by loading a property with studios and one-bedrooms, the sales market operates under different rules. “There’s a premium for larger contiguous space,” Miller explains.
Stephen Kliegerman, president of development marketing at Brown Harris Stevens, points to a 36-unit boutique condo rising at 200 West 88th Street, where half of the residences feature four or more bedrooms, including five full-floor penthouses. Based on the building’s zoning envelope, the developer, Nortco, had originally planned a more typical unit mix consisting mostly of one- and two-bedrooms. However, after analyzing market data, it became clear that larger residences would perform significantly better. The smallest layout in the building is now a three-bedroom.
According to Kliegerman, the price per square foot for these larger homes was in some cases 50 percent higher than for smaller units in comparable properties, and the absorption rate—how quickly buyers purchased them—was much faster, yielding a stronger return on investment. Furthermore, construction costs are lower for buildings with larger units because they require fewer individual kitchens and bathrooms overall.
Still, real estate experts emphasize that not every site or neighborhood makes sense for this kind of development. Greenwich Village, for instance, remains an area where smaller one- and two-bedroom apartments make more sense, often purchased by parents for their young-adult children who want to live downtown.
There is also an inherent financial risk in stacking a project entirely with huge apartments. Kliegerman notes that if a building features 100 average-size one- and two-bedrooms and the market experiences a drastic economic downturn similar to the 2008–2009 financial crisis, a developer can pivot the unsold units to a rental model to survive. It is considerably more difficult to pivot a boutique 36-unit building composed exclusively of massive apartments and make the economics work under distress. Many of the historic, family-sized prewar apartments across the Upper West Side were similarly chopped up into smaller units during the Great Depression.
Those grand prewar apartments—alongside thousands of others on Park Avenue and throughout the Upper East Side—were constructed at the tail end of the Gilded Age, an era defined by low income taxes and affluent families employing live-in domestic staff. Today, income inequality is soaring back toward those historical levels. Amid ongoing public concern over the local housing crisis and calls to build significantly more housing across the city, a sizable chunk of new development has instead skewed toward these very large, ultra-luxury units accessible to only a tiny fraction of the population.
“We’re no longer building smaller apartments because the math doesn’t work,” Miller says, highlighting high construction and land costs alongside persistently high interest rates. In the 1980s, a condo development site on the Upper East Side might have featured 300 units comprised mostly of studios and one- and two-bedrooms, complete with a communal pool on the roof. That same property today is more likely to feature two-, three-, and four-bedroom layouts, sprawling penthouses at the top, and a pool relocated to a lower floor.
“The way the market is structured, it just favors apartments for the more affluent,” Miller concludes. In an extreme example, the ultra-slim residential tower at 111 West 57th Street, built atop landmarked Steinway Hall, features just 59 apartments across its 1,500-foot height, ten of which contain four or more bedrooms. Among them, one of the larger penthouses is currently listed for $55 million.
