On May 29, Broadway producer William DeSeta and his wife Donna closed on the sale of their 11,700-square-foot townhouse at 323 West 80th Street for $7 million. The buyer: an LLC tied to Kassin Sabbagh Realty.
The DeSetas had owned the property since the 1970s. They first tried to sell it in 2017, listing it for $20 million. Nine years and multiple price cuts later, the final transaction landed at roughly one-third of that initial ask.
The property stands six stories tall with 31 rooms, a full basement, an indoor garage, and a private roof deck. It was marketed as a vacant mansion, not a multifamily building, per Compass brokers Mark Jovanovic, Scott Hustis, David Son, and Nora McGuire.
The last asking price before the sale was just under $7 million. That means the property sold at or very near its final list price—but only after a 65 percent haircut from the original 2017 ambition.
This is not a distress sale in the traditional sense. The DeSetas carried no public mortgage on the property, per ACRIS records. They had the luxury of time. They chose to transact at this level anyway.
What changed? The market for oversized Upper West Side townhouses has narrowed sharply. The buyer pool for a 31-room mansion with no elevator and a price tag above $10 million is thin. At $7 million, the property becomes accessible to a different class of buyer: developers and investors who see conversion potential.
Kassin Sabbagh Realty is a known quantity in that space. The firm has a track record of acquiring underperforming residential assets and repositioning them. The LLC structure suggests the buyer is not buying a primary residence but an investment.
The $7 million price implies a per-square-foot cost of roughly $598. That is below the neighborhood median for townhouse sales in 2025, which hovered around $1,200 per square foot per Douglas Elliman data. The discount is structural, not cyclical.
Compare this to the commercial deal that topped the same day's records: a 23,200-square-foot retail property in Long Island City sold for $31 million, or $1,336 per square foot. The seller, an LLC tied to Ashley Cho, had purchased it in 2008 for $6.6 million—a 370 percent gross return over 18 years.
The DeSeta mansion and the LIC retail property represent opposite poles of the same market. One seller waited nine years and accepted a 65 percent discount. The other held for 18 years and realized a 4.7x multiple. The difference is not location alone—it is pricing discipline and buyer demand depth.
For institutional capital, the lesson is straightforward: trophy residential assets with limited functional utility trade at a liquidity discount that widens as holding periods lengthen. The DeSeta property sat vacant for years. Vacant assets carry carrying costs—taxes, insurance, maintenance—that erode equity even without a mortgage.
The broader market implication is that the repricing of New York City residential real estate is not uniform. It is asset-specific and buyer-specific. A 31-room mansion with no elevator and a niche buyer pool is not a liquid asset. It is a liability disguised as a trophy.
Kassin Sabbagh Realty now owns a 31-room Upper West Side mansion at a basis that allows for a range of outcomes: conversion to condominiums, a high-end single-family flip, or a hold for further appreciation. The DeSeta family exits after a 50-year hold with $7 million in cash and a nine-year marketing campaign behind them.
The final price tells the story. The market does not care about the 2017 ask. It cares about the 2026 bid. And the bid, in this case, was $7 million.