As a real estate agent,
you never really know who you’re dealing with.
She could have been an actual billionaire.
She could have been a scam artist,
and I would never know the difference.
This project is kind of like a Robin Hood project.
I pretended to be a billionaire
so I can get into the most exclusive apartments in New York.
We're not just selling a building.
The reason why people are living here
is because of the lifestyle that we’re offering.
Eighty-five million.
Ten million.
Sixteen million.
These people are the 1 percent of the 1 percent.
I think it’s really obscene that these buildings exist.
Your maid would be getting ready with dinner
while you’re just having one of the finest champagnes
in a soaking tub with your husband.
Imagine waking up every morning to these views.
Gabriella...
I really see you living here.
[FAKE BILLIONAIRE]
The cheapest property I’ve been to was 10 million,
and the most expensive was 85 million.
They manipulate the cities
to the disadvantage of everyone else in the cities.
My name is Andi Schmied,
and in 2016, I spent three months in New York
at an artist residency program.
Basically, this whole idea started with the biggest cliché
that I went up to the Empire State Building,
and I saw the views.
And I basically realized that there are lots of buildings
that are as tall or even taller than the Empire State Building.
And I just basically was really curious about
what the view from those buildings looked like.
That’s when I started to work on my book and my project.
I chose 25 buildings, high, which were luxury towers.
Ninety-three stories above the city,
this is what $81 million gets you:
a full penthouse,
8,400 square feet with floor to ceiling views of a metropolis.
My goal was really to show those views
that are considered to be the best views
you can privately own in New York.
First, I really just wanted to photograph the views for the book.
As I was going deeper and deeper in this world,
it became more and more obvious
that it’s something totally bizarre and crazy.
I was laying in bed, and really I was just thinking,
“How could I get in those buildings?”
I remember I talked about the project
to the curator who was working at the residency, and she told me,
“No way they would ever let you in without a credit check.
The only way for that is to pretend to be a billionaire
who is searching for an apartment.”
From the moment that I started to work on the project,
this was pretty much the only thing I could think about:
write it down, check the address,
go home, check if there’s any real estate available,
call the agency,
and usually, next day, go and see it and take a picture of the view.
And so really, for three months,
I was living in between this Gabriella,
which was my billionaire persona, and myself,
back and forth on the A line from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
My name is Daniel Rosenstein.
I've worked in real estate for four years.
I met Andi two years ago
when she was infiltrating New York’s most exclusive properties.
I was doing Airbnb in my apartment in the Upper West Side.
And first, I remember that he asked me,
“What are you doing in New York?”
And then he said he’s a real estate agent.
I was actually a bit hesitant to tell him what I came here for.
She told me that she was making a book.
So I think at first, I was like, “Oh, is she mocking our profession?
I’m just a pawn in your project here.”
And then the more she was talking about it,
the more I saw her point of view,
which is almost nobody has access to these apartments.
You have to go through a doorman.
You have to reach out to a real estate agent.
It’s not a normal real estate market,
where you can show up to an open house.
She asked a few questions,
I think how to navigate getting into buildings.
I told her to use the term, “We’re looking for a pied-à-terre
or second home in the city.”
A lot of really wealthy people look for second, third,
fourth, fifth homes,
and she at that point had essentially created her whole persona.
Gabriella is my actual middle name because, at the beginning,
I didn’t know if they would check my passport ever.
And actually, at some of the properties, they did check it.
And I remember, back then, I got really obsessed by
many of these small details— that I need to do my nails,
and I need to have proper shoes, proper bag.
In order to do this project,
I needed to bring my camera and photograph the view.
This made me obviously very unusual in the eyes of the agents.
But I also realized that the stranger I act,
the more convincing it is that I’m actually a billionaire,
and I just don’t give a shit.
I was really, really nervous at this very first viewing.
The agent started to ask me if I have a chef, if I have a nanny,
if we have a private chauffeur.
So I just randomly answered yes and no.
And all of these answers kind of became part of what Gabriella was.
Tell your husband every morning
that this is really where you want to be.
There are a few different types of agents.
There are the ones who are very natural
and just showing you, here is the kitchen,
here is the bathroom,
this is the price.
And there is the complete other end of the spectrum.
You will feel, Gabriella, it is like going on a journey
from the sidewalks of 19th-century, old New York
to the sidewalks of Florence.
I actually might just prefer the 21st century--
Imagine your daughter running around saying words in Hungarian.
It was really hard to keep a straight face in those viewings.
I mean, it was really bizarre what they were telling me.
Sit down, Gabriella.
It really is a moment for you.
Just tell your husband.
He loves you, and he wants you to be happy.
I’m sure he will not say no to you
if you let him know this is really your first choice.
Because this ultra-luxury segment of the real estate
is actually now not really going that well,
the newer the development,
the crazier the amenities they have
because there’s really this huge competition.
One of the things that became an absolute standard for these buildings
is the golf simulator room,
Michelin-starred private restaurant in the building,
theater, swimming pool, obviously.
Equinox gym.
They have a children’s playroom, a billiards room,
a conference room, and everything in between.
In one of the penthouses,
it was that they would give you a yacht as a present
when you buy the apartment.
A yacht.
So you mentioned the number of people who are actually living in poverty,
according to the federal poverty numbers.
But we all know, living in New York, it’s a whole different ballgame.
The average rent across the city
has returned to nearly pre-pandemic levels.
We built fewer homes in the 2010s
than in any decade going back to the 1960s.
I think the way poverty is usually portrayed is from the bottom.
So, talk about homelessness,
or you talk about people who cannot afford housing.
I think when you see it from this very top of the sphere,
it somehow is also very telling.
The buildings that you can see from every single corner of the city
are these ultra-luxury real estate,
which are not accessible for anyone, really.
Apartments and buildings are standing 60 to 70 percent empty.
Commercial and residential wonderland
featuring some of the city’s tallest buildings
and most expensive restaurants and condos.
If you are looking to call Steinway Tower home,
studios start at $7.7 million.
Listen, not to be not sympathetic to the homeless,
but if you live in One57,
you’re paying millions of dollars to live there.
Do you want a homeless shelter in your building? I don’t think so.
We are not building enough housing
for everybody who needs a place to live.
Here’s what it’s like living in the smallest apartment in New York.
Wherever your expectations are, lower them.
So these buildings are kind of really soulless, in a sense.
They are super standardized.
The trends that I see in these properties
are a lot of the same finishes and materials used.
Some of the floor plans are the exact same.
I think it’s a really challenging task
to create something different
when you’re working with essentially the same floor plan,
which is a tall square or a rectangle in the sky.
Oh, wow. Who was the interior designer?
Deborah Berke.
There is no one better in design at the moment.
So you have always some very special type of marble in the apartment
that the agents would always highlight.
The marble is Siberian,
which is now the best on the market.
Then you would have the oak floor,
which is always the best type of oak floor.
And there’s really nothing
that would make any of these buildings stand out, to be honest.
But it’s not really surprising when you realize that
it’s solely a form of investment, most of the cases.
So it’s really not about living, and it’s not about having a soul.
And it shows.
It’s really obvious when you are there.
One of the most striking things was
how agents are trying to always go out of their way
to tell me that no one else lives in this building,
that I'm not going to have any neighbors.
A lot of these Billionaires’ Row towers
are investments for overseas and local people,
so they’ll rent them out or they’ll just own them,
have them sit empty for a number of years
and resell them.
It’s a safe investment. It holds value over time.
But what that translates to is buildings sitting empty.
There’s a trickle-down effect,
so once the hyper-expensive properties
become even more expensive,
it raises the value of everything else beneath it.
I get very often the comment
that this project is kind of like a Robin Hood project,
in the sense that I’m getting the views which other people
or most people cannot see to the public.
And it’s like being so high up, it’s cool.
But then it didn’t feel good to be there, in a way.
One of the very big problems of these buildings,
they are casting sometimes hundreds and hundreds of meters of shadows,
for example, over Central Park
or over other people’s up until then sunny living rooms,
or just over the streets.
And so, somehow, these buildings that are not even lived in
are taking away such natural things from the rest of the city
as sunlight.
There’s a lot of money in New York.
And I think there will always continue to be
a lot of money in New York.
I do think it’s going to be more segregated.
What I’ve learned from this project
is really just how obscene differences are in society, I guess,
and how this can translate into
this very literal physical form in the city
and how that is impacting everything around it.