Who's laughing now? (Shultz/The Real Deal)

We hate to break it to our colleagues at The Real Deal, but it seems like Boston Properties boss Mort Zuckerman is not a reader, and if he was, he's not anymore.

If Mr. Zuckerman were a subscriber, he would have known the paper's "Closing" interview, which runs on the back page each month, is a lighthearted affair. Yet the developer—who as owner of the Daily News, you would think could take a joke—was having none of it, especially after The Real Deal got a little personal.

When The Real Deal asked about the size of his apartment, one of the tamer questions slated for him, the 74-year-old billionaire said he didn't "have any idea" about the square footage, called the question "silly" and terminated the interview.

[...]

You live at 950 Fifth Avenue. What's the square footage of your apartment?

I don't have any idea. I'm not going to answer these kinds of questions. This has got to be serious. Why don't we speak later? I'm sorry, I've got too many things to do. This is silly. The size of my apartment? This is silly. Come on. I don't deal with these things. I'll call you back. I'm going to get off. I'm sorry. [Click]

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Mr. Zuckerman considered moving into space vacated by The Journal in 2008 when it moved to the News Corp. building in midtown, but the building wasn't able to support all of the Daily News' infrastructure needs.

Here's the release:

New York City's most beloved, best-read and largest circulation newspaper, the New York Daily News, and U.S. News & World Report Media Group, the preeminent national multi-platform digital publisher of news, rankings and analysis, will be moving their respective headquarters to 4 New York Plaza, the iconic 25-story office tower located at the southeast corner of Water and Broad Streets in the Financial District. The long-term lease is for two entire floors, comprising 100,000 square feet.

"We're very much looking forward to the relocation of the New York Daily News and the U.S. News & World Report Media Group to 4 New York Plaza," said Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Chairman and Publisher of the New York Daily News, and Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News & World Report. "These are first-rate accommodations in the heart of the city's financial district with superb amenities. This location will provide our employees with a modern new home."

The building's owner, an affiliate of Harbor Group International, LLC, the Norfolk-based real estate investment and management firm, was represented by CB Richard Ellis' Howard Fiddle, vice chairman, and Bradley P. Gerla, executive vice president. Representing the tenant on the transaction was Cushman & Wakefield's John Cefaly, vice chairman, and Michael Burgio, executive vice president.

"It is an honor to have such prestigious publications as major tenants in our building," said Jordan E. Slone, Chairman and CEO of Harbor Group International. "In the six months since purchasing 4 New York Plaza, we have achieved 85 percent occupancy with three significant long-term tenants. It speaks volumes about the desirability of the building and bodes exceptionally well for the future of Downtown."

The New York offices of the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report are currently headquartered at 450 West 33rd Street in the Hudson Yards area and expected to move to 4 New York Plaza by July 2011. Their new home is convenient to all forms of public transportation, and close to the New York Stock Exchange, South Street Seaport and other key downtown destinations.

The Class-A office property consists of 1,085,000 rentable square feet on 1.2 acres. The building features large floor plates of 50,000 square feet and has an on-site cafeteria with seating for up to 650-people. JPMorgan Chase occupies 75 percent of the building, and is also on a long-term lease.

According to Mr. Gavin, "An official announcement has not yet been made, although staffers were recently informed of the move."

Update, 6:27 p.m.: Poynter has the memo from Bill Holiber and Brian Kelly.

“The Macklowe situation sort of became a bellwether,” one investment broker said.

Now that the bellwether has spoken, what exactly does it say?

Real estate experts are tepidly optimistic that the GM Building deal could reinvigorate the sluggish Manhattan investment sales market.

Emphasis on tepid. Manhattan towers are not about to start selling like so many Stella McCartney camisoles at an H&M megastore. But they may start selling at a less lethargic pace—which is something, is it not?

“I don’t think we’ll see an immediate reaction in building sales,” said an investment broker. “Over time, I think we’ll see an increase of activity.”

“This is all good news for the market, and I think people will be relieved,” said Michael Eric Anton, executive managing director of Eastern Consolidated. “I think it will be quiet for the summer, and then, hopefully, building sales will start picking up. Things don’t happen on a dime.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that the denouement would be anticlimactic.

Following an excruciating four months of bidding and negotiating and exhaustive speculation, the GM Building sold for about $2.9 billion, or $1,450 for each of the tower’s two million square feet. It’s the biggest price tag yet for a building—more than twice the $1.4 billion Mr. Macklowe paid for it back in 2003, and $1.1 billion more than the previous record, set by Kushner Companies when it bought 666 Fifth Avenue last January from Tishman Speyer for $1.8 billion. (Jared Kushner, a principal at Kushner, is The Observer’s publisher.)

The sale was helped along by a number of factors. First, Mr. Zuckerman and friends didn’t have to approach lenders for billions in fresh debt to purchase the building, something that Craig Evans, the senior managing director for institutional investment sales at Colliers ABR, said would have been “very difficult.”

Rather, the buyers will take on the $1.9 billion in debt already built into the GM Building, care of Mr. Macklowe. Were it not for that built-in debt, it’s unclear if any buyer would have been able to raise the amount of equity to purchase the property.

“Developers and buyers, if you compare them to drug addicts, they love debt,” said Mr. Anton. “It’s not that people are afraid of taking on debt; it’s that debt is not available.”

Could these Macklowe sales stimulate a more flexible debt market?

It’s possible, said Mr. Anton. “Maybe this gives bankers a bit more comfort in the fact that there are still buyers out there for Class A buildings.”

That said, while the GM Building’s built-in debt made it easier to sell, Mr. Macklowe’s status as a distressed borrower, with creditors after him like sharks on chum, helps explain why he sold relatively cheap, the sales price falling well below original estimates that it would exceed $3.5 billion.

“It’s a bargain,” one real estate broker said.

Boston Properties, which is leading a team of investors that includes Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and reportedly Qatari and Kuwaiti investors, paid another $1 billion for three other properties once belonging to Mr. Macklowe: 540 Madison Avenue, 125 West 55th Street and Two Grand Central Tower.

The genesis of the deal developed, of course, last February, when Mr. Macklowe, in a move typical of his aggressive investment style, took out major loans from Fortress Investment Group and Deutsche Bank to buy seven Manhattan towers for $7 billion. He put down $50 million of his own money and used the GM Building as collateral.

The gamble didn’t pay off. His bills came due just as the credit crisis hit. Mr. Macklowe had to sell the building that he’s said to have coveted since the ’60s, when he watched it rise, story by story.

The four-month-long struggle to sell the building also strained Mr. Macklowe’s relationship with son and heir apparent, Billy Macklowe, according to an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.

The younger Macklowe plans to take control of Macklowe Properties as chairman in the next few weeks and lead it on a more conservative path. He’s been the firm’s president since 2002.

Otherwise, however, it’s hard to construe the sale of the GM Building and accompanying towers as anything but a positive development for the Manhattan market.

“The Boston Properties deal with Macklowe, on the heels of Related’s recent agreement on the M.T.A. rail yards sites, bodes well for New York,” said Jon Caplan, a member of Cushman & Wakefield’s New York investment sales team. “These are major investments in New York City by major, sophisticated New York owners. They feel the underlying pulse of the city and understand the lack of supply in the office and residential markets.”

Or, as Mr. Anton put it, “The GM Building, the biggest question mark, is now put to bed.”

It was to be a pep talk: The last decade, characterized by its nearly annual tradition of soul-wrenching job cuts, was over. “We’ve got to get off our ass,” he said to the assemblage of reporters and salesmen; it went over well, less like a scolding than a slap on the butt from Coach.

Two months later, a somber group showed up at the Newsday auditorium for cannoli, pecan pie and coffee to say goodbye to the 36 newsroom buyouts Tribune had exacted from the paper, including three national reporters, several business reporters, its features editor, its movie editor and two critics. (Some reporters were taken off other desks and transferred to the Long Island desk.)

There was a speech, but no toasts, no booze, and very little of that Zell zetz you hear so much about. With recent sales, and further attrition, younger reporters in the newsroom have begun to adopt a pet nickname for the newspaper’s Melville headquarters: Hellville.

Mr. Zell recently said that the Tribune Company—which owns Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune—was doing so poorly that “we may have to reevaluate a lot of our decisions,” which included selling some Tribune properties.

Newsday was put on the block, and the three usual suspects have shown up: the owners of the region’s two other tabloids, Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, and the perennial also-ran of Long Island media efforts, Charles Dolan. (Last time they sold Newsday, he was mad nobody told him.)

The price quoted for the paper keeps changing, but it’s pretty fair to call it a fire sale.

So what does Sam Zell know that these New York media veterans don’t?

For one thing, Sam Zell was never cut out to be a player in a single regional media market. What can the Tribune Company do with a Melville bureau? And is it worth it to sustain one so that their Pentagon coverage can reach Long Islanders?

But for Messrs. Murdoch, Zuckerman and Dolan, Newsday instantly gains them the wealthy, suburban readership their other properties—the New York Post and New York Daily News—haven’t quite been able to crack.

Since the Long Island Press folded in 1977, Newsday has gone without any daily competition in covering the island; the paper tells advertisers it reaches 71 percent of all Long Island residents, themselves a significantly more acquisitive lot than most random samples you could take somewhere else.

“If you asked me five years ago, I would have said it would fetch $1 billion,” said John Morton, a newspaper analyst. “Now it’ll get somewhere closer to $600 million.”

But even at that, the paper is still making money, something Mr. Murdoch can’t say for the Post. Last year, Newsday had an operating revenue of $498 million, according to an S.E.C. filing, and an overall cash flow of $88 million, according to an internal memo.

“Newsday is a great property,” said Jason Klein, the president of the Newspaper National Network, a company that sells ads to newspapers. “It’s one of the largest circulation papers that penetrate deeply into an affluent and suburban area.”

And it is rarer still that its entire circulation—which ranked 12th nationally in 2007—is almost entirely suburban (read: deep wallets).

But that’s also precisely the reason that Newsday doesn’t serve much of a purpose for Mr. Zell.

“If he’s going to sell a paper, I figured it would be this one,” said Edward Atorino, a newspaper analyst at the Benchmark Company. “It’s a little too local, especially compared to the Chicago Tribune or the L.A. Times. It doesn’t have the national presence that those papers do—they are national brands.”

In his two-month tour of newsrooms, Mr. Zell has hinted that he’s looking for more consolidation among his news outfits—for his papers to work almost as a wire service for another.

In a late February meeting in the Tribune’s Washington bureau, his comments seemed to indicate that he was interested in creating something like a mini Knight Ridder. He reportedly complained about the papers’ overlaps (competing “fiefdoms” he said); why, then, one could imagine him thinking, would the L.A. Times have a Pentagon reporter when the Chicago Tribune already had one? Ideally, there would be centralized news coming out of the bureau used for various papers, and bodies could be saved. Calling the bureau “bloated,” he reportedly pointed to the L.A. Times Washington bureau chief, Doyle McManus, and said, “Your revenue is down 20 percent. How many of the 47 [newsroom staffers] did you get rid of?”

With that logic, a religiously local paper like Newsday would serve no purpose.

And in recent weeks the message has been sent loud and clear to newsroom members that the paper has given up entirely on producing a national product.

“In 2004, there was a question if we should be a national newspaper that also covers Long Island,” said one reporter, after attending a meeting with the paper’s editor, John Mancini, last month. “Now that’s not even a thought anymore. It’s a paper that doesn’t have any national aspirations.”

“Local, local, local,” said another.

“It’s incredibly influential!” said Richard Kessel, the former chairman of the Long Island Power Authority and one of the leading public faces on the island for the past two decades. (Utility companies are the heavyweights out there!) “It’s the only major game in town. Yeah, some people read The Times and the Post and the News, but for the people in public life, including myself, all that matters in the end is Newsday.”

Competition is light. The Post and News only come out for made-for-tabloid stories like Joey Buttafuoco, or more recently, the trial of a middle-aged black man who shot and killed a white Long Island teenager two years ago.

The Times largely gave up its coverage of Long Island in 2006, when Bill Keller said that its Sunday regional sections would “combine reporting on the themes that unite our region”—which meant fewer unique stories, more trend pieces for the region overall.

Meanwhile, the paper says 48 percent of Long Island residents read it every day, and 57 percent on Sunday.

But even with that: “Its influence might have diminished slightly over the last 10 years with the advent of the Internet and News12, but it’s still has an impact,” said Mr. Kessel.

There was a time when business was better for the paper, of course. The paper once had foreign bureaus—which shuttered last year—and as late as 1997, the paper still flew in potential job candidates for one-week stays, paid them a one-week salary and covered their airfare and lodging, a luxury they afforded long after The Times had dispensed with a similar program.

In the mid-1980’s, it started its own stately tabloid for the city, New York Newsday. That paper was wildly successful in one respect; in a profile for The Village Voice, investigative reporter Wayne Barrett wrote that it covered “city and state government more thoroughly and substantively than any local competitor, including The Times.” But in every other way it was a bad business. In 1995, Newsday had the largest drop in daily circulation in the country, thanks largely to the city edition. New York Newsday shuttered later that year, at a time when the company closed down 800 jobs and spilled journalistic talent (familiar names like Jim Dwyer, Eliot Spitzer scoopster William Rashbaum) all over the city.

It was a preview of things to come. After the Tribune Company bought the paper, more layoffs followed. In 2004, the paper was caught in a circulation scandal in which they had been hyping fake numbers to potential advertisers; they had to pay out $80 million to advertisers.

Then this past year, things got worse. Their performance in 2007 was “well under plan,” said their publisher in an internal memo. The paper’s cash flow in 2007 was at $88 million, which was “well below” the paper’s goal of $95 million, according to another memo written by the paper’s publisher, Tim Knight.

After Mr. Knight announced the news, he fired his advertising director and announced a wide search—with the help of an outside firm—to find a new senior vice president for advertising. But two months later, no replacement had been named, leading some in the newsroom to speculate recently that the paper was being stripped to the bone in preparation for an impending sale (according to one source, the paper has discontinued the search altogether).

So enter the three men interested in buying the paper.

All three have their constraints: Mr. Murdoch paid $5 billion last year on Dow Jones and recently shut down Pagesix.com because of the current economic downturn; Mr. Zuckerman, a real estate mogul, is in the process of developing two Eighth Avenue skyscrapers and has reportedly bid on the GM Building on Fifth Avenue, which is expected to sell for more than $3 billion; and Mr. Dolan recently tried to take Cablevision private at a price of more than $10 billion but was rebuffed by investors because they felt his bid was too low.

Other strategies may exist as well: Perhaps a partnership; perhaps combining a printing press. Newsday itself reported that Mr. Murdoch has been in conversations with the paper’s union since late February or early March.

If they do buy it, the advantages include consolidating editorial material, and perhaps even advertising. Of course, at a time when advertising has been doing very poorly, any advertising synergy is a trickier proposition.

In the newsroom, Newsday employees are walking around with their shoulders slumped, said one. They’re speculating on rumors and wondering what will happen next.

“If I had my choice, I would take Rupert Murdoch,” said one. “That may sound strange, but if you pair him up and compare him to the others, he comes out well above. Dolan isn’t anything—nothing! He’s brainless, clueless, stupid, arrogant. Murdoch is a newspaperman.

“Most people here would prefer Murdoch,” the reporter continued. “A couple years ago it would have been a horrible thought, but now we’re left with no other choice.”

Taken with another tentative mega-lease with the law firm Proskauer Rose, said to be about 400,000 square feet, the hungry attorneys seem to have vindicated the decision by Mr. Zuckerman and his Boston Properties to push forward with a formerly tenantless building at a time of financial uncertainty.

Despite the relatively advanced stage of planning for the project—Boston Properties has filed for building permits for the tower—Mr. Zuckerman seems reticent to release much info about the building. His regional manager for New York, Robert Selsam, declined to provide renderings or to comment on the lease, saying that the firm would do so at its own pace. Representatives from Boston Properties and its broker CB Richard Ellis also would not comment.

Rents are expected to be high, perhaps over $100 a foot, for the tower, which Mr. Zuckerman has said is modeled after the modernist-style Lever House.

CB Richard Ellis represented both Boston Properties and Gibson Dunn on the deal.

The home of Mr. Zuckerman’s prized asset, the Daily News, is in contract for more than $700 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

A young and bullish landlord, Broadway Partners, will buy the 14-story media mecca at 450 West 33rd Street for more than $410 per square foot from a group of owners, led by Joseph Chetrit.

Aside from the $1.8 billion sale at 666 Fifth Avenue that closed in January, this sale will be the largest of 2007 thus far.

The 1.7-million-square-foot building, which is awash in the smell of newsroom body odor and deadline desperation, counts the News, the Associated Press, Channel 13, and U.S. News & World Report among its headliner tenants.

For Broadway Partners, the deal is another huge splash into real estate. Last year, Broadway Partners took control of a portion of Beacon Capital Partners’ national portfolio for more than $3.3 billion, which includes the 60-story John Hancock building in Boston. (The 38-year-old building at 450 West 33rd Street, incidentally, used to be called the John Hancock building.)

But this deal presents a sort of awkward arrangement for Mr. Zuckerman. When Broadway purchased the Beacon portfolio last year and its mass of properties, it made itself a direct rival of Mr. Zuckerman’s real-estate empire, Boston Properties.

Mr. Zuckerman will now pay his newfound adversary every month.

The Daily News and U.S. News & World Report (another Zuckerman asset) have at least 200,000 square feet in 450 West 33rd Street, according to a leasing broker at the building. If Mr. Zuckerman has no issue with dealing with Broadway Partners thus far, he might when he sees the new rent figures.

For one thing, the News lease was signed in the mid-1990’s, which means Mr. Zuckerman locked in rent numbers at a below-market rate. And when the News lease ends, the Far West Side should be populated with new glass office towers and condos, which should hike rents up even more. The average asking rent in the building now, according to a market report, is $40 a foot.

Broadway Partners knows exactly what it has gotten itself into. The building has 800,000 square feet of air rights available, the New York Post reported.

The source familiar with the deal said that it had not been decided whether Mr. Chetrit or Broadway Partners would take the air rights.

Representatives for Broadway Partners and Mr. Chetrit declined to comment.

THE NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING ISN'T having any trouble finding tenants. And, unlike so many of its iconic peers, it’s not turning residential, either.

Totally the opposite: The building is now fully leased, after filling 300,000 available square feet in the last 18 months.

The leasing agent, Cushman & Wakefield, finished tying the big golden bow around the New York Life Building at 51 Madison Avenue this week.

“We worked hard on this, and it’s been successful,” said an understated Paul Glickman, a leasing broker at Cushman who led the campaign.

The insurance company told Mr. Glickman 18 months ago that it was redeploying lots of its employees to Westchester, and that floors 17 through 32 at the Cass Gilbert–designed, 40-story landmark would become available.

The rest was in the hands of the brokers. The commercial brokerage set out its task, complete with morale-inducing military metaphors: It would go on a “campaign” to lease the building, and organize its efforts into “phase one” and “phase two.”

Bring on the surge! Mr. Glickman, along with his team—Mitti Liebersohn, David Glassman, Diana Biasotti and Shawna Menifee—arranged all the transactions.

Mr. Glickman said he was most proud of how diverse the tenants are.

A sampling: Educational publisher Addison Wesley Longman leased the 27th through 29th floors, with nearly 40,000 square feet; a private equity firm, Accretive Technology Partners, took the 31st floor; and a law firm, Quinn, Emanuel, Urguhart, Oliver & Hedges, took the 32nd.

What’s most exceptional is that the New York Life Building is not foundering. So many city landmarks, which were constructed without big floor plates or bloated rent checks in mind, are struggling to find an identity.

The Empire State Building is on the verge of purging half its tenants so it can make much-needed upgrades; the Toy Building is nearly empty and might stay office or go condo; part of the Woolworth Building has gone condo; the clock tower at 1 Madison is now residential; and the Rodin Studios at 200 West 57th is on the verge of a major makeover.

Exhausting, right? That leaves the golden-pyramid-topped New York Life Building well ahead of the pack.

And what does it have over its peers?

Well, for starters, a 1,000-seat cafeteria—the quality that Mr. Glickman and Ms. Biasotti first mentioned.

But then there’s also good management.

“The fact that it’s a headquarters-caliber building—these tenants got the benefit of being located in a place created to service New York Life,” Mr. Glickman said.

REAL-ESTATE BROKERS DON'T HAVE a lot of time, so who cares if they buy their rumpled suits off a rack at the Men’s Warehouse?

Well, it is Fashion Week, so the Plaza-district brokerage PBS Realty Advisors is trying to change the look! On Wednesday, Feb. 7, PBS will dish out $100 gift certificates from Bergdorf Goodman to the first 75 brokers who arrive to take a look at 150 East 52nd Street.

It won’t quite buy a full suit, but a nice scarf could offset those somber suits!

“Bergdorf is one of the better department stores in the city, and we thought this was a nice way of offering the community a gift,” said John Brod, a principal at PBS.

The 300,000-square-foot jagged glass building has its niceties: By October, 90,000 square feet will be available, where each floor promises 10 corner offices, said Mr. Brod.

Even nicer is the breakfast the brokers will be fed after they get their ticket to high-end fashion. According to an e-mail invitation, the brokers will be fed “Fresh Fruits & Berries drizzled with Mint Syrup, Yogurt Parfaits with Granola, Mixed Berries and Diced Mango.” Talk about classy!

Daily News Hub Sells for $700 Million
"Now, Mort Zuckerman will have to write his monthly rent checks to a rival. The home of Mr. Zuckerman's prized asset, the Daily News, is in contract for more than $700 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal."
New York Life Building Fills with Tenants
"The New York Life Building is not having any trouble finding tenants. And, unlike so many of its iconic peers, it's not turning residential, either. Totally the opposite: The building is now fully leased, after filling 300,000 available square feet in the last 18 months."
Go to Commercial Breaks by John Koblin.

Spitzer Aide as Transit Savior: Arise Again, Moynihan Station!
"Just a matter of hours after Gov. Spitzer won [in November], Patrick Foye, not even announced as chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, began to chart the course of an entirely new office district with a double-headed train station. Since then, Mr. Foye and others who work for him have been moving forward quickly to get Moynihan Station back on track after its demise in the final months of the Pataki administration, expanding the scope of any project to include the so-called Plan B, which would involve a new Penn Station as well."
Go to story by Matthew Schuerman.

It's a Long, Long Sales Haul for Manhattan Condos
"At the dawn of 2000, when the idea that the average sales price for a Manhattan apartment could top a million dollars was but a glimmer in the eyes of brokers, it took 118 days, on average, to unload a condo. Not anymore. According to appraisal firm Miller Samuel, which prepares a quarterly market report for brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman, by the start of 2007, the average number of days it took to sell a condo shot up more than 60 percent from barely two years earlier."
Go to The Lab by Tom Acitelli.

Wendy Wasserstein's Garret Windows Go for $5.22 M.
"It's been one year since the playwright Wendy Wasserstein died at the age of 55, and her old apartment, on the 11th floor of 75 Central Park West, has now been sold for $5.22 million."
Did Lehman Estate Get Close to $32 M. at 2 East 67th?
"Back in 1978, after the death of her colossal art collector husband Robert Lehman, Lee Anz Lehman bought herself the ninth floor of 2 East 67th Street. The queenly apartment will soon change hands after nearly 30 years: according to the Corcoran Web site, where the apartment was listed for $32 million, her estate has now signed a contract to sell the co-op."
Go to Manhattan Transfers by Max Abelson.

On Jan 24, Politico's Ben Smith published a PDF of Rudy Giuliani's 127-page campaign dossier, a secret battle plan. Smith had also reported on the brief while working at the Daily News earlier this month.

In the document, Zuckerman is listed in the "Prospective Leadership" category, alongside NewsCorp chief Rupert Murdoch and several captains of industry. And Zuckerman is also penciled in on Giuliani's October calendar. (Incidentally, Zuckerman's name does not appear in the Daily News' Jan. 2 cover story.)

"How my name got on the list, I don't know," Zuckerman said.

But did the Daily News not publish the full document on their own Web site because Zuckerman's name appears on the list of targeted donors?

"Nobody made the decision not to publish it, other than a normal editorial decision," said Zuckerman.

Daily News Editor-in-Chief Martin Dunn is away this week, and Senior Executive Editor Robert Sapio did not return calls for comment.

When Politico first published the Giuliani dossier, private phone numbers were listed, too. They have since been redacted.

"I've been called a number of times," said Zuckerman. "I think the technical term is pissed off."

-Michael Calderone

But there’s trouble these days in the once-cozy relationship between exclusive co-op buildings and Manhattan’s most prolific political givers.

“They are sick of the fund-raising,” said one Upper East Side broker, of the top co-ops. “They don’t want elevators filled up with people. They are going to make sure people that want political fund-raisers find halls.”

According to several of Manhattan’s most high-end brokers, co-op boards in some of the best buildings—including 720 Park Avenue, 770 Park Avenue and 1 Beekman Place—are beginning to clamp down on large political bashes, asking pointed questions in board interviews of buyers known for their campaign fund-raising.

Kathy Sloane is a broker at the luxury real-estate agency Brown Harris Stevens. She is also a prominent political fund-raiser, and so it’s no surprise that in political circles, the broker who found Hillary and Bill their homes in Chappaqua, N.Y., and Washington, D.C., is well-known to a few of their friends looking for an apartment suitable for giving fund-raising cocktail and dinner parties.

“I’ve had customers come back to me and say that they were asked if they would be giving large fund-raisers in the apartment” when they come before the co-op board for approval, said Ms. Sloane.

Traditionally, top co-op buildings have shunned anyone who might bring unwanted attention to their wealthy, publicity-shy residents. In the past, that’s included flashy Hollywood stars, tabloid-friendly musicians, foreign dignitaries and even a former President—essentially, anyone regularly trailed by paparazzi or burly men in dark suits, with sunglasses and squiggly wires tucked behind their earlobes.

These days, political functions require an ever-increasing security detail for certain figures, bringing with it a higher level of intrusiveness.

“In a political fund-raiser, many people walk through the front door who are not known by the host or hostess,” said Ms. Sloane. “So I think there is less confidence about the guests at a large political fund-raiser.”

Also, there are inconveniences that the truly rich must deal with, like trying to get past a horde of limousines and town cars lined up outside the building, or getting into an elevator when 200 people are coming and going upstairs.

In the past year, Ms. Sloane has worked with prominent Democrats like Stephen and Sharyn Mann, and Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel—who purchased a $20 million apartment 10 floors below their current residence at 720 Park. Over the years, the power couple’s luxurious spread has been visited by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Clintons. (Incidentally, it was President Clinton who made Mr. Spielvogel the Ambassador to Slovakia.)

But since the Spielvogels were only moving downstairs, they wouldn’t have to face the tough board questions that could have arisen if they were seeking entry to another gilded corridor on Park or Fifth.

And at some co-ops, it might be difficult to deal with the strict rules—especially when one wishes to bring their partisan donor pals around for drinks. With wealthy Northeast liberals never in short supply, most exclusive Manhattan co-ops lean towards the Democratic Party—especially on Central Park West, with the Beresford, Dakota, El Dorado, 88 C.P.W. and the most donkey-friendly of them all, the San Remo.

“In the past, you didn’t want movie stars there,” said Laurance Kaiser IV, of Key Ventures Realty. “Now, you don’t want a politician who’s controversial.”

While the East Side buildings still have more Democratic donors on average, based on campaign contributions, the political makeup is comparatively more mixed.

“As far as political fund-raisers, the broker who is attempting to find a place better understand the makeup of the building,” said Emilie O’ Sullivan, of the Corcoran Group. “If the building tends to be Republican, they don’t want a Democratic fund-raiser. If there are a lot of Democrats in the building, they might not want to take a big Republican fund-raiser.”

In one unfortunate instance, “a prime fund-raiser who attempted to get into a top-notch building” was denied, according to Ms. O’Sullivan. Although the broker declined to name the buyer, she said that the unlucky buyer was given the right to withdraw, taking their deposit with them. “[T]he person ended up buying in a condominium,” she said.

“The reason you do it in your home is to avoid the overhead,” said Ms. O’Sullivan. “Then it’s all donation. [But] those days are getting to be slimmer and slimmer. The ones that have been having them—720 Park, 770 Park—they’ve been asked to pull back.”

While some luxury brokers claim there is a decline in the number of politically driven soirées, one veteran political consultant hasn’t noticed a drop.

“The biggest, highest donors still do it in their homes,” said Hank Sheinkopf. “There’s still no substitute to Park and Fifth Avenue as the locales for the rich to meet with the rich—and give checks to rich.”

“Some of these apartments are absolutely spectacular,” added Mr. Sheinkopf. “The apartments themselves are draws. It is both a social and political event. It’s the best way to wed two things—comfort and cash removal.”

But if Ms. Sloane and her friends in the real-estate world are to be believed, that marriage may be coming to an end.

“In the old sense, the big cocktail parties are not so much a practice anymore,” Ms. Sloane said.

Now, she thinks, the place to put political moneybags is out in the Hamptons, or in townhouses.

“Their house is their castle, so they can make the rules,” she said.