All The Most Important Buildings In New York Are Boring

The most expensive buildings in New York are all about location (and location and location) — just not the locations you’d think. It turns out that real estate people like being close to Metro-North trains:

Most of [the most expensive] buildings, if sold today, would eclipse the $1.8 billion record that 666 Fifth Avenue set when it closed in January. . . . Most of these buildings are near Grand Central Terminal. Others are either on or just off Fifth Avenue, and one is located downtown. According to those interviewed, Rockefeller Center would, all together, sell for more than $8 billion, and the G.M. Building by itself would clear $4 billion.

Which is to say, architectural gems like 200, 245 and 277 Park Avenue (don’t worry if you don’t recognize those addresses) are the big draws for real estaters:

Hey, what about those other icons piercing the sky? Why didn’t the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building — or even the Woolworth Building — make the list of New York’s priciest?

Well, real-estate people aren’t aesthetes.

Something that New Yorkers regard as an engineering disaster — the MetLife Building girdling Grand Central Terminal, for instance — can be, for real-estate people, the gold standard for office towers. Why? A building like MetLife was designed specifically with bloated rent checks in mind, while the Woolworth Building’s tiny floor plates certainly were not. And higher rents mean higher sales prices.

The Empire State Building has its own issues, like a decades-long battle to attract tenants. It’s been the butt of jokes among real-estate brokers. (The Empty State Building! Ha!)