Was the sky, or the wedding-cake ceiling, the limit?

Amassing and connecting a melange of co-op apartments scattered about a coal baron’s Fifth Avenue mansion was an outlandish dream, even for Howard Ronson, the commercial real estate developer who kicked off the buying spree at 828 Fifth Avenue, also known as the Berwind mansion, before his death in 2007.

His heirs tried to carry on, but they could never quite replicate their patriarch's acquisitive charms. With four of the nine apartments in hand, they stopped far short of Ronson's goal of total building domination. Nor could they (or would they) sell the spread, at least not for $72 million. After putting the apartment on the market in May, in a bid to catch one of the many over-eager trophy hunters said to be sniffing around New York, the family pulled the property just a few months later.

Several sources told The Observer that Ronson's widow Angelika and children have decided to stay put in their puzzle-piece palace. Or at least as "put" as renowned jet-setters said to spend much of their time in Monaco can stay.

Does this also mean they've decided to carry on Ronson's vision of re-assembling the entire house and returning it to its former glory? As they like to say, in for a penny, in for a pound. Or rather, in for $33.95 million (the amount the four apartments cost the Ronson family), in for $100 million (or more!)?

We'd wager that this clan is not quite so cavalier with its dough and that the decision to pull the property had more to do with a lack of interest. None of the former listing brokers—it was held by Corcoran brokers Sharon Baum, Leighton Candler and Deborah Grubman, as well as Stribling broker Alexa Lambert, returned The Observer's phone calls, so we can't be sure, but we'd say the agglomeration was not so popular with buyers and the family is waiting for a later date to list the individual units.

A $72 million sale would set a townhouse sale record and then some (the largest sale to date remains the $53 million dollar sale of the Harkness Mansion). The co-op record lingers at the same threshold, having been set this spring with the sale of the Courtney Sale Ross apartment for $52.5 million. And no matter how magnificent this corner mansion might have been, the units weren't even attached. After all, an ultra high net townhouse lover would probably be inclined to go for the intact Woolworth Mansion, listed at $90 million, rather than bribing/begging his neighbors to move out and then undertaking a huge renovation.

"I’m sure it couldn’t be bought," one broker not associated with the listing told us. "For god’s sake, it was a lot of different units."

kvelsey@observer.com

Indeed, Mr. Senk listed the three-bedroom, four-bath home for $5.9 million just days before his resignation became public. He's since become the CEO of upscale jeweler David Yurman. After spending 18 years helping to determine the sartorial desires of so many would-be hipsters in high school and college, he apparently thought it was time for something more age-appropriate. We've had that moment with more than a few sheer tops and cheap baubles from the retailer.

But could anyone really outgrow a pre-war apartment and its sprawling, corner living with a wood-burning fireplace? Especially one connected by French doors to the corner library? We can even imagine ourselves having a romantic candle-lit feast for all our witty, artistic friends in the "spacious dining room perfect for large dinner parties or intimate gatherings." Which makes us wonder: have Corcoran listing brokers Leighton Candler and Jennifer Garabedian been reading catalog copy lately?

Still, you never know what these things are actually going to look like in reality. We've made enough ill-advised purchases—unflattering dresses that in the store conjured up Victorian romps in enchanted woodlands where cheeks are always rosy and hair always artfully disheveled— to know that these things don't always pan out. Which could be why buyers David and Anne Altchek bought the place for $5 million, according to city records, a comfortable discount from the $5.45 million that it was most recently asking.

Amazingly, this may be the only Urban Outfitter-affiliated product that sold without a huge mark-up (the prices for flimsy hippie chic products at Free People never cease to shock us)—Mr. Senk bought the co-op for $4.56 million back in 2006.

kvelsey@observer.com

142 East End Avenue (StreetEasy)

Way back in 1995, a forensic pathologist took the stand of the O.J. Simpson trial. An expert witness for the defense, Michael Baden suggested that there had been two killers that fateful night, and O.J was ultimately let off. Mr. Baden has unloaded some serious baggage recently, but it isn't an explanation for his dubious theory. No, in this case it comes in the form of a four-bedroom, four-bath townhouse in Yorkville.

Dr. Baden, who  briefly served as New York's Chief Medical Examiner in the late 1970s, just sold a townhouse at 142 East End Avenue, according to city records. While he got O.J. off scot-free, the good doctor took a hit on the sale. Originally listed last May for $4.1 million, the blood-red brick townhouse just fetched $3.55 million.

The buyers are Christina and Ulises Liceaga. Mr. Liceaga, an architect at Fractal Construction, said he was well aware of the previous owner's morbid profession, but the intrigue was of little interest to him or his wife. "We were not even curious about it. It's jut a house, it doesn’t matter who owns it," he said rather flatly, refusing to discuss the matter further. We take it they're not worried about finding bloody gloves in the backyard, then.

Mr. Baden, who was also the Chairman of Forensic Pathology on the House panel that re-investigated President Kennedy's murder, has lived in the home since 2000. Corcoran broker Leighton Candler sold the 31-foot-wide home on behalf of Mr. Baden, but her scant description of the place leaves much to be desired. She notes only that it is a one-family space with views of Charles Schulz Park's grassy knolls. The Observer may have to call her in to testify if we want to more.

eknutsen@observer.com

In 2008, Ms. and Mr. Mack, who chairs AREA Property Partners and co-developed the Time Warner Center, bought two adjacent apartments at 560 Park Avenue for a combined price of $20 million with plans to combine the two into one unit. Looks like the combination has come! The couple put their 760 Park abode on the market last October for $10.9 million with Corcoran champ Leighton Candler (the Macks' daughter-in-law is president of Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group).

SEE PHOTOS OF THE CO-OP HERE >

Six months later, the three-bedroom, 4.5-bathroom, "rarely available" gem was signed, sealed and ready to be lived in again. The master suite—once two bedrooms, now combined into one master master—boasts a wood-burning fireplace and matching his and hers dressing rooms and baths. The "gracious" open floor plan "allows guests to flow between the library, oversized living room, and dining room while enjoying eastern light from forty feet of frontage on Park Avenue."

Maybe Mr. Mack's Apollo partner, Leon Black, also a resident at 760 Park, will drop off a pie—after all, the listing ensures the apartment has "the perfect layout for entertaining."

cmalle@observer.com

More Manhattan Transfers:

Former French First Lady, Event-Planning Hubby Buy in Orson Welles' Old Building

Myster Buyer Goes Into Contract at 26 West 76th for $19.5 M.

Hedge Fund Honcho Steve Eisman Plays Hopscotch on Park

His mansion’s tag was cut in February from a city-leading $75 million to $65 million. Last month, records show, it quietly left the market.

“I think the era of mega-sales is definitely over; we all know that by now,” Brown Harris Stevens managing director Sami Hassoumi explained this week. Three years ago, he sold the city’s most expensive townhouse, the $53 million Harkness Mansion, which he’s reportedly now marketing for millions less than it cost.

Kirk Henckels, the bow-tied director of Stribling Private Brokerage, calls it the end of the trophy: Prices are plummeting for New York’s most hilariously expensive listings, like his Astor duplex at 778 Park Avenue, and the wildly rich, even the billionaires, are buying prudently, if at all.

But along with top brokers’ stoic acceptance that the good days are over is a grinning confidence that they’ll be back. The almost needlessly titanic trophy sale will return, they say, but it will take years.

THINGS WERE DIFFERENT VERY recently. Last year, a hedge fund manager and his young wife spent $46 million on a duplex penthouse at 1060 Fifth Avenue, more than a New York City co-op had ever cost. It’s not that the place was even in pristine shape—its two levels were uncombined—it’s that New Yorkers were clamoring to pay awesomely unreasonable premiums to own glittery Manhattan real estate, even as the national housing market collapsed.

The sums were literally unprecedented. In July, without doing major work, the couple sold the penthouse for $48.9 million, retaking the co-op record from a $48 million deal at 2 East 67th Street that had closed two weeks earlier. At that sumptuous apartment house, three apartments are now on the market asking a total of $103 million. A fourth was pulled last month without a closed sale.

“Money had no meaning,” Mr. Henckels explained Friday. “You had to club them away. And now you’re out there pulling them in the door.”

John Burger, who listed the 1060 Fifth apartment when it sold for $46 million, pointed out on Friday that hugely posh buildings used to have only one apartment on the market at a time—“and the buyers would be lined up at 30-minute intervals in the lobby waiting to see it.”

It was the magical tautology of New York luxury real estate: Supremely grand homes sold grandly because they were supremely grand homes! Humdrum technicalities like price per square foot were beside the point: Proper co-ops don’t even share square footage numbers. “If somebody loved something, and the asking price seemed 5 or 10 percent too high, they didn’t care,” said Mr. Burger, who was talking in a Hamptons garden where blue jays and cardinals and catbirds were chirping. “Time would solve the fact that they were paying a premium.”

But that’s not what happened. The week that Lehman collapsed, the high-end Brown Harris Stevens broker Kathy Sloane told 20/20 that Manhattan’s finest co-ops “may have already lost a fourth of their value as a result of the financial crisis.”

Not only were brokers panicking, but there was panic about their panic. Even before Ms. Sloane’s interview aired on television, Brown Harris’ aristocratic president Hall F. Willkie issued a press release calling her comments “completely speculative, and at times factually incorrect.”

As it’s turned out, any high-end New York apartment that’s lost only a fourth of its value would probably be considered lucky. This month, deeds show, a 26-foot-wide, 20-room mansion at 18 East 82nd Street sold for less than half its original $29 million asking price. Even if brokers are now mostly serenely acknowledging the market’s downfall, one of the city’s top townhouse brokers heard about that sale and said, “Fourteen point three million for that building? You’re positive?”

EVEN BILLIONAIRES ARE BUYING modestly. So far this summer, the pharmaceuticals mogul Michael Jaharis has paid $6.7 million for an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a weirdly paltry sum for the neighborhood; and the family of hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen bought a downtown duplex for $2.7 million, about a third of what he spent on Damien Hirst’s shark piece.

“No matter how many billions you had, you have fewer billions,” said Richard Wallgren, the sales director at Robert A. M. Stern’s limestone-caked 15 Central Park. The broker said he’s been dealing with tycoons who are suddenly asking for comparable sales figures. “They don’t want to pay too much. It’s that simple.”

“Some people are concerned; some people are concerned what others will think,” said Paula Del Nunzio, another broker who worked on the record-holding $53 million Harkness deal. “If you work for a public company, you’re damned scared. You’re very, very careful, because you don’t want it to become an example of gross greed inadvertently.”

Mr. Wallgren briefly listed a 15 Central Park West penthouse last year for $80 million, even though it had been bought for $21.5 million. It was taken off the market in October, listed again in February for $47.5 million, and, records show, taken off the market in early May. Mr. Wallgren would not comment, except to say that it hasn’t been sold or rented.

Last week, The Observer reported that only one of the 10 Manhattan residential properties asking over $45 million in late 2008 has sold. (The $80 million Central Park West listing wasn’t included in that tally because it had been temporarily taken off the market. Nor was Mr. Arader’s mansion, which had been marketed chiefly as an art gallery.)

On July 16, a duplex at 1030 Fifth Avenue that had come on the market at $47.5 million was reportedly cut to $19.9 million. A day after that, the $51 million tag for Trump Park Avenue’s duplex penthouse was chopped $20 million to $31 million.

WILL THE ERA OF the deliberately conspicuous trophy sale return? “Just sit tight and wait,” Mr. Hassoumi said.

“Every 25 years, cycles come and people say, ‘That’s it! It’s not happening again!’ said Leighton Candler, who worked on both of the record-setting deals at 1060 Fifth Avenue. “But of course it will.” Ms. Candler was raised in a 38-room mansion, but her family moved out when her father, an eccentric Coca-Cola Company heir, went bankrupt. “Everything comes around again and again.”

“The market readjusts,” Mr. Burger said. “The question is, will it take three years or will it take five years?”

“The euphoria has passed—for a very brief period of time. And when it comes back, we’ll put it back on,” Mr. Arader said about his Madison Avenue mansion. “I shouldn’t have said ‘clubbed to death’—they’ve been clubbed unconscious for a few years. And they’ll be back. And they’ll be bidding on properties for their trophy wives again.”

mabelson@observer.com

Yet this month, according to city records filed late last week, a five-bedroom, 8,300-square-foot penthouse at the Time Warner Center, which was the single most expensive apartment on the market in New York City when it came on in 2008 for $65 million, has sold for just over half that asking price. Austrian-born, Princeton-educated investor Gerhard Andlinger got $37.5 million for his apartment, the biggest New York City residential deal in nearly one year. Nothing has sold for more than $35 million since a Fifth Avenue co-op was bought last July for $48,836,000, the appraiser Jonathan Miller confirmed.

Even if it seems odd and uncouth to complain about a $37.5 million real estate sale, the apartment was bought for $11.5 million less than its most recent, discounted tag. "It is a very low price," said Roger Erickson, the broker who sold a 75th-floor, 4,454-square-foot Time Warner apartment in January 2008 for $24.48 million. "What the hell did I get? I got $5,400 a square foot last year." Actually, he got $5,496.

Mr. Andlinger's penthouse, which was asking $7,831 per square foot back when the tag was $65 million, got $4,518.

"I think it's good news--it's a transaction happening!" Corcoran's Leighton Candler, who brokered the $48.8 million co-op deal last year, said Tuesday about the Time Warner sale. "Thirty-seven million is not chump change. That's a lot of money to spend on an apartment."

On the plus side, Mr. Andlinger paid only $25 million in March 2005 for the apartment, where the master bedroom suite includes an office, his-and-hers dressing rooms, his-and-hers bathrooms, and a gym; the 41-foot-long living room has floor-to-ceiling windows; the corner library/office is covered in red lacquer; the dining room has a view of the Hudson River; the pantry has a laundry center; and the five bedrooms all have en-suite bathrooms.

On the down side, the yearly maintenance charges and real estate taxes add up $356,316.

The apartment was bought anonymously under the name Southerndown, Inc. One lawyer listed on the deed did not return an email, and another declined to comment. Mr. Andlinger, who was barred from serving as a public company's director or officer for five years as part of a 2003 settlement with the SEC over insider trading allegations, could not be reached through his office, or at a Florida residence.

mabelson@observer.com

But like everyone who deals in the world of overpriced, pine-paneled uptown real estate, Ms. Candler hasn’t fared perfectly.

Earlier this year, she lost the listing for the Astor duplex, whose tag had already gone down from $46 million to $34 million. It is now on the market for $29 million with Stribling’s Kirk Henckels. “It’s a very aggravating thing, but, certainly, I can understand,” she told The Observer in January. That month, her 7,000-square-foot penthouse duplex at 1020 Fifth Avenue was cut to $39 million, down from its original $50 million asking price. Three weeks ago, according to the listings Web site Streeteasy, her $43 million penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue, owned by Tina and Bill Flaherty, a zinc magnate, was taken off the market.

Last Thursday, it was listed again and at the same price. “It’s her understanding, and for that matter my understanding, that it’s never been taken off the market. I really think that’s most likely a computer glitch,” a spokesperson for Ms. Flaherty said. “She’s doing a great job.” Through that spokesperson, Ms. Flaherty added: “I have the highest respect for Leighton Candler and I think she’s doing an excellent job representing the apartment in this difficult market. There are few in the industry that both sellers and prospective buyers respect as much as Leighton. Unlike some brokers, Leighton has no hidden agenda and is completely trustworthy.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Candler’s listing at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South was cut from $35 million to $29.75 million late last week. The hedge fund executive who owns it, the same one who bought and sold the record-setting 1060 Fifth penthouse, paid $28.5 million for the terraced 5,894-square-foot condo last year, which means he will almost certainly take a loss.

But that’s not so out of the ordinary in today’s world of 5,894-square-foot real estate. And Ms. Candler, who would not comment for this story, will be O.K.: Late last week, she got the listing for art collector and mega-investor Glenn Fuhrman’s 5,022-square-foot condo at 515 Park Avenue. It’s asking $15.75 million.

mabelson@observer.com

Last March, agents from both Brown Harris Stevens and Sotheby's came to audition for the listing with their brokerages' presidents; a Stribling broker even came in with a colleague who knew the family from church. But Ms. Candler got the listing, Astor's daughter-in-law later told The Observer, because she's "smart, she’s dynamic, she works hard. She’s very funny, she’s from the South—yay! Good girl, like me."

"It wasn’t, 'Did I tap-dance better than anyone?'" Ms. Candler said about her Astor interview. "They were very judicious. And, of course, they cared very much that you’re someone who would present the property well and speak well and all those nice things." (It was probably hard to be charming and proper during the interview: Brokers had to sit in a room with Astor's stately son, Anthony D. Marshall, who had been accused of stealing from his mother while she was ill, as well as bankers from JPMorgan Chase, who had become Astor’s court-appointed guardians.)

The apartment has remained unsold despite a massive price cut from $46 million to $34 million, and despite summer renovations, when the co-op was briefly pulled from the market.

It's likely the listing will resurface shortly with another broker, who, one can only imagine, will opt to put the Astor name in the listing. Ms. Candler, profiled recently in The Observer, simply and primly referred to the co-op as a "stunning 14 room apartment offering high ceilings, six terraces, five wood-burning fireplaces, and four or five bedrooms."

Last year she brought this reporter into the apartment, where, besides sitting in Astor's famously lacquered library, one could walk from the chandeliered private elevator to the 30-foot-long front gallery to the hidden wet bar with six shelves of crystal, plus scotch, gin, vodka and bourbon.

Update: According to a source, the listing is going to Stribling Private Brokerage director Kirk Henckels, who's well-known for his bowties. "I like Kirk so much," Ms. Candler said. Asked about losing the listing, she said the one thing that's hard is having done so much work. "It's a very aggravating thing, but, certainly, I can understand." Mr. Henckels could not be reached.

Ms. Candler has several tectonic listings to worry about, including this penthouse, which she’s marketing for $46.5 million, down from last year’s $50 million tag. There’s the late Brooke Astor’s duplex on Park Avenue, for example, or a smaller penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue, for which a zinc magnate and his estranged wife are asking $43 million. Those alone make her the most important co-op broker in New York right now.

Even though she cut the price at Astor’s apartment from $46 million to $34 million this month, that duplex and the others are all going to be hard sells. Luxury real estate’s go-go years are over, and the descent into stale malaise has been swift and melodramatic.

On the bright side, Ms. Candler notched two of the last go-go deals. In January, her clients, a hedge fund manager and his philanthropist wife, paid $46 million for a duplex penthouse at 1060 Fifth Avenue. No co-op had ever sold for more. Then the couple got overwhelmed by the prospect of lengthy renovations and decided to sell.

“I said, ‘Are you sure? Really, I think you should think about it, it’s really fabulous.’ … Finally, they were like, ‘Too much of a project. We’ve got to sell it.’ I’d tell them several times to keep thinking about it, because it is really one of the extraordinary apartments in New York. There are not a lot of penthouses that big with those huge views. They said, ‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right, but we really do. It’s really too big, it’s really too much, we really do not want to start this project, so can you sell it?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, I can sell it.’ They said, ‘O.K., well, would you?’ I said, ‘You really mean it? You want me to do that? Think about it again.’ They said, ‘O.K., we’ve thought about it again. Yes.’ I said, ‘O.K.’”

ON JULY 29, the penthouse duplex sold for $48,836,000. “She has near reverence for these really splendid prewar co-ops. She has such enthusiasm, such love,” that philanthropist wife said this week about Ms. Candler. “She walks into an apartment and she can immediately tell if it’s correct or incorrect.”

Ms. Candler’s first colossal and entirely correct co-op deal was in 2006, when she listed the billionaire David Koch’s $30 million apartment, which had belonged to Jackie Onassis. That was at 1040 Fifth Avenue, where she ended up befriending owners in the building, like the zinc magnate’s wife, and, more importantly, the philanthropist and her hedge fund husband. This January, Ms. Candler sold their co-op at 1040 Fifth one week before they bought the record-setting $46 million penthouse at 1060 Fifth.

“I see the buyers who need large penthouse apartments with outdoor space,” Ms. Candler said, sitting alone last week in a Corcoran corner office. “That’s what I do! It’s like the Marilyn Monroe ‘Specialization’; you know that song of Marilyn Monroe’s? I know about who’s looking for Upper East Side unusual penthouse apartments, or lovely unusual apartments, even without terrace space. But what I know is every single person who’s looking for that. Of course I do.”

She sold Sotheby’s vice chairman Jamie Niven’s place in 2006, too. “Leighton’s style is very much Southern lady. She’s very charming, she’s got wonderful manners,” Mr. Niven said this week. “She’s one of these people who happen to be well brought up, a nice Southern girl, and I think people like that.”

ACTUALLY, HER CHILDHOOD was very Southern but not entirely nice. She was raised in a 38-room mansion in Atlanta’s high-nosed, high-chinned Buckhead neighborhood; her mother was born on Monmouth Plantation in Natchez, Miss.; her father was Coca-Cola Company founder Asa G. Candler’s great-grandson, John H. Candler Jr.

“He was extravagant and charming and fabulous and flamboyant and all that,” Ms. Candler said of her late father.

He went bankrupt around 1969, and the family moved from their 38-room mansion to a townhouse.

“For anyone to go bankrupt, of our family, was absolutely horrifying,” Ms. Candler explained. Her parents were divorced within a few years. “You know, sort of, life fell apart!” she said in a weird sing-song. “He went bankrupt and that was that.”

“He sure spent a lot of time in hot water, and a fair amount of time in a caftan,” said House Beautiful contributing editor Frances Schultz, a friend of the broker’s. “He would actually literally wear them to the driving club.”

Ms. Candler moved to New York in 1979, enrolled in Parsons and joined the Junior International Club set. “Daddy had done business with a lot of people in New York,” she said. “The Carnegies were friends of his, and Huntington Hartford.” After college, she became an assistant to interior designer doyenne Elisabeth Draper. “I had to get to work. And I took that seriously. It was always really important to make sure I would always be able to keep a roof over my head.” That decade, her father was convicted on eight counts of passing $3.8 million in fraudulent checks.

Around 1989, when she was attending parties for Saul Steinberg in Quogue or for Malcolm Forbes in Morocco, interior design led to apartment sales. Then Manhattan real estate crashed.

“I mean, there were a few years that were the kind of scary that some brokers starting out now are going to see,” Ms. Candler said. “Thank heavens that I’m my mother’s child. … I don’t buy jewelry, I don’t buy artwork, I don’t buy cars, I don’t want to buy horses, I don’t want to travel more. … I always know my entire budget, I know everything I spend, I am not a huge spender, I don’t borrow any money I can’t pay back, and I never have less money than—I mean, I have a mortgage on something” (a modest place in Water Mill) “only because my accountant said, ‘You have got to have a mortgage.’”

She’s been renting the same Central Park South studio for around two decades. “I live in small spaces. That’s what I like. I wouldn’t want to live in a vast space. … I love other people to have those apartments. I totally understand it. I love coming back to my little nest as long as I can look out and see everything.”

Ms. Candler, unlike most brokers, and especially unlike most powerful brokers, seems genuinely happy. Her friend Lynn Nesbit, the potent literary agent, called it ebullience mixed with pragmatism.

What makes Ms. Candler happiest and most fulfilled, besides proper co-ops, is the ubiquitous presence of a 10-year-old black pug named Major Commitment. “And that’s amazing contentment, what a strange thing,” Ms. Candler said. “But I’m too kinetic; ‘contentment’ implies chewing my cud, which I don’t do. I don’t sit around going, ‘Oh, I’m fine.’ I always shuffle around.”

The hedge fund manager and his philanthropist wife are still shuffling, too. This month, Ms. Candler listed their full-floor condo at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South for $35 million. The couple bought it only this July for $28.5 million, but, like their place at 1040 Fifth Avenue and then the record-setting duplex penthouse at 1060 Fifth Avenue, the Ritz-Carlton turned out to be not quite perfect. “We’re totally looking,” the wife said this week. “And Leighton is our broker. I would like to wait out the co-op market a little bit, but, of course, we’re always looking.”

Do these wait-and-see months bring back bad memories of the broker’s father? “Actually,” Ms. Candler said, “I’m completely over that now.”

mabelson@observer.com

Then there's the fact that the Ritz-Carlton doesn't have the social cache of 778 Park Avenue (Astor's building) or 1040 Fifth (where Ms. Candler is listing the penthouse for $46.5 million).

But consider that the apartment was bought only three years ago by one of the building's developers, Christopher M. Jeffries, who paid $16 million. But he sold his terraced condo on July 31 for $28.5 million; no mortgages show up in city records, so it's likely the anonymous buyer paid in cash.

Three months and two weeks later, that buyer wants to sell for $6.5 million more.