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In the next three months, roughly 54 apartments at one of the most famous flops of the real estate bust, the slender 50-story luxury condominium tower One Madison Park, are expected to finally hit the market.
Their debut comes less than a year after developer Ziel Feldman stepped in and scooped up a slice of the $240 million debt on the property at a hefty discount and then, in partnership with giant Related Cos., he seized control of the tower, with its commanding views of the popular flatiron district park, in a bankruptcy auction.
"When the market crashed, I started seeing opportunity," said Mr. Feldman, founder of HFZ Capital Group, sitting in his sleek, contemporary-art-adorned Madison Avenue office.
At that point, he also started buying, quickly morphing into one of the city's biggest owners of once-troubled condo projects. Today, just
as the condo market stirs back to life, Mr. Feldman is beginning to cash in some of his chips even as he begins new projects. In the next one or two years, he's planning to selloff roughly 1,000 luxury condo units in prime neighborhoods across Manhattan.
Among them are those in a 32-story tower at East 51st Street and Second Avenue where a crane accident six years ago killed several people, and the once-stalled 163-unit condo conversion of the Setai Wall Street downtown - a Zone A property that emerged virtually unscathed from Superstorm Sandy's 14-foot surge.
Buoyed by that latter experience, Mr....