Blackstone bigwig sells Park Avenue co-op for $13 million 

Financier Jonathan Gray, who through his three decades with Blackstone helped the asset manager assemble the largest commercial real estate portfolios in the world, has parted with a property closer to home.

Gray, Blackstone’s chief operating officer, and his wife, Mindy, a philanthropist, have sold their five-bedroom co-op on the Upper East Side, according to the city register.

The duplex apartment at 925 Park Ave., which features a living room with a fireplace, an eat-in kitchen with a pantry and a formal dining room, plus a primary suite with a fireplace and a spacious dressing room, traded for $13 million, property records show. The deal, which closed Monday, included two storage areas. Margaret Boyden was the buyer, records show.

Gray, who helped his buyout firm orchestrate one of the largest-ever takeovers, the $39 billion acquisition in 2007 of Sam Zell’s 600-building Equity Office company, seems to have a good sense of the local residential market.

In November Gray listed the apartment, which spans the third and fourth floors of a 14-story prewar building at East 80th Street, for $12.5 million. So the unit, where the couple raised their four children, managed to find a taker relatively quickly and at a slight premium to boot.

The co-op, which was designed in part by architect Peter Pennoyer, looks to have been a solid investment overall. The Grays purchased their co-op in 2005 for about $8 million before adding the two storage areas, in 2015 and 2016, for a total of about $600,000, the register shows, so the property cost about $9 million all in.

Joining Blackstone in 1992 after earning English and business degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, Gray spent his early years helping to run the company’s then-much-smaller real estate group.

In the years that followed the blockbuster Equity Office deal, Blackstone shed most of those commercial towers—a seemingly prescient move based on what’s become of the office sector in the Covid era—but also dramatically ramped up its residential holdings along the way.

Today the firm, which was co-founded by Stephen Schwarzman in 1985, reportedly owns and manages 300,000 units of rental housing in the U.S. but has remained active in commercial sectors such as warehouses, data centers and student housing.

The billionaire Gray, considered Schwarzman’s heir-apparent, is also a major donor to the Democratic party and supports causes across the city through his family’s decade-old philanthropic group Gray Foundation, which recently stepped in to fund swim lessons for second-graders.

A Blackstone spokeswoman said Gray was unable to comment by press time. And Hilary Landis, the Corcoran Group agent who marketed the home, did not return an email for comment.

C. J. Hughes , 2024-05-24 19:33:54

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