Iconic Dakota building struggles amid condo competition

What do Grammy-winning singer Roberta Flack and late socialite Jacqueline Bikoff have in common?

One buyer is snagging both of their homes inside Manhattan’s storied Dakota building for an undisclosed sum.

Their two co-op apartments have entered contract to a mystery purchaser who could combine them into a grand 14-room manse, The Post revealed earlier this week. Flack’s residence, which has spent time on and off the market since June 2015, most recently asked $6.99 million — down from its original $9.5 million asking price.

Bikoff’s, listed for $16.75 million in January 2016, underwent five price cuts to $10 million. Brokers for both units declined to comment on deal specifics.

Should the deal close in 2018, these would be the first Dakota apartments to sell since 2016, when a two-bedroom traded for $2.83 million, according to CityRealty.

The significant reduction in the co-ops’ asking prices, though, begs a reexamination of the tony building’s status in the city’s elite real estate market.

The Dakota — constructed in 1884 on Central Park West and 72nd Street as America’s first-ever luxury apartment building — has long boasted well-heeled residents with glitzy homes to match. In 2015, for instance, it nabbed a flurry of headlines for the $21 million sale of late starlet Lauren Bacall’s nine-room, park-facing residence, which spent less than a year listed.

But a handful of other apartments there have faced longer spells on the market and a number of price cuts before entering contract or being delisted. From one perspective, the Dakota may now be a place where savvy buyers can find a relative deal — should the notoriously strict co-op board approve them, of course.

At the same time, the lingering, discounted units indicate that the city’s high-end prewar co-op market is losing its luster, in part because it faces intense competition from new condo developments.

StreetEasy shows six Dakota units currently on the market, from $1.69 million for a foot-in-the-door one-bedroom listed since 2016 to an 11-room $20.5 million home that hit the market in the fall.

At price points in between, there’s the home of embattled financier Alphonse Fletcher Jr. — a court-ordered listing priced at $9.85 million, down from its original $12 million in 2016.

There’s also a renovated four-bedroom that first asked $17.5 million in 2015 and is now $13.99 million following its third price cut and third broker swap.

These Dakota pads are actually among “the best deals in the city, especially considering the significant provenance associated with living at the Dakota,” says Dolly Lenz, a broker to the stars now marketing the $13.99 million home, as well as a two-bedroom listed for $3.88 million last April.

“You can be buying a piece of history,” Lenz adds, adding that the more expensive unit she is repping, while modernized, also contains original moldings, woodburning fireplaces and paneling.

The building does have quite the illustrious past. Designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (who later designed the Plaza Hotel) in a German Renaissance style, the Dakota, originally a rental, was the brainchild of developer Edward Cabot Clark. Its construction coincided with the arrival of elevated rail lines on the Upper West Side, but Clark aimed to pioneer a trend of apartment living for the upwardly mobile classes at a time when the poor lived in tenements and the wealthy lived in mansions.

The Dakota’s interiors were meant to mimic the latter’s, with the same moldings and fireplaces, but in an apartment building setting that offered both convenience and lower prices.

“It was a whole new marketing concept that nobody had ever thought of,” says Andrew Alpern, author of “The Dakota: A History of the World’s Best-Known Apartment Building.”

Records of tenants who lived there until the building’s 1961 co-op conversion are not available, but in the years since, its roster of residents are a who’s who of creative types.

Beyond Flack and Bacall, composer Leonard Bernstein, “Frankenstein” actor Boris Karloff and ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev have called the Dakota home.

Perhaps its most famous residents are Yoko Ono and the late John Lennon, the latter of whom was shot in the building’s arched entryway.

But star-studded history hasn’t always translated into successful sales. Over the years, other listings have floundered. A prominent example is the “unsellable” home of ad exec Ilon Specht, who first brought a four-bedroom Dakota spread to market for $19.5 million in 2006, only to have it delisted a decade later when it asked $14.5 million, StreetEasy shows. Another: A three-unit combination owned by Tribeca Film Festival co-founders Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal aimed for $39 million in 2016 and later lowered its ask to $28.99 million in 2017. It now appears to be off-market.

“The buying audience has gone elsewhere,” says broker Donna Olshan, who’s repped a number of deals in luxury Central Park West co-ops over the years. “It underscores the whole change in taste.” The shift is to newly built condominiums, which are luring deep-pocketed buyers instead.

But local real estate experts emphasize these listing struggles aren’t solely limited to the Dakota. To a degree, they’re also apparent at comparable nearby prewar addresses. At the Majestic, at 115 Central Park West, a three-bedroom home originally asking $5.99 million in 2015 bounced on and off the market for a year before selling for $4.6 million.

More famously, at the San Remo, at 145-146 Central Park West, Demi Moore’s penthouse sold for $45 million in 2017, marking a $30 million discount and two years since it first listed.

Other data points to the decline in these types of apartments. From the fourth quarter of 2012 to the same quarter in 2017, average sales for prewar co-ops priced over $3 million down Central Park West, Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side plunged 44.2 percent to $6.1 million, according to Miller Samuel. Meanwhile, average sales for new-development condos priced over $3 million on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side rose 25.3 percent over the same time period to $4.96 million.

“[It’s] the first significant competition that [the high-end prewar co-op market] has seen,” says Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel. “The new-development phenomenon is not a passing fad. It’s a significant change in the Manhattan housing market.”

While buyers seem to be leaning toward taller towers with views, a laundry list of amenities from catering kitchens to lap pools, and turnkey convenience, Dakota insiders are confident that the building can evolve with the times. Its mansard roof and grand facade just got a refresh. Insiders say a new gym will debut this year.

“It’s iconic. It’s priceless,” says Sasha Bikoff, Jacqueline’s interior designer daughter, who spent two years gut-renovating her mother’s Dakota apartment, where lacquered walls mix with original moldings.

Bikoff admits that the apartment attracted little interest from prospective buyers in the first year after it listed, but that she was patient.

“The end game is more rewarding when you buy a piece of history in New York,” says Bikoff, who adds that new developments can’t invent that. Buyers in those are “not appreciating all the craftsmanship and the details.”

Consider this: Not everyone needs to.

The Dakota “doesn’t need to appeal to everybody,” says Scott Cardinal, an architectural historian who’s published several books on the building, which has just 93 units. “All it needs is 100 people who think it’s awesome. I don’t think it will ever have trouble finding people.”

ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlfnl7j2pmamhfnrCwusicZJ2Zm6TBonnBrqClnJmjtG6%2F06usoJ%2BcmsBurcyim2abn6OxsHnCqKSpnaSewaq7zWg%3D