The billionaire head of a soap and shampoo company appears to have cleaned up with the sale of his uptown townhouse.
Glenn Nussdorf, CEO of Long Island’s Quality King Distributors, has found a taker for 14 E. 81st St., a six-bedroom, six-floor spread on the Upper East Side, for $19.6 million, according to the city register.
Nussdorf and his wife, Claudine, had hoped to get more for the 8,200-square-foot property — a 20-foot-wide, elevator-equipped edifice from 1884 on an elegant block near Fifth Avenue. The couple listed the property, whose primary suite encompasses the entire third floor, in May 2023 for $22 million, meaning it sold after a haircut of 11%.
But the home — which features a wine cellar, landscaped garden and living room with a fireplace — sold in relatively quick fashion, going into contract Feb. 29 and closing April 9, according to the city register.
Some townhouses in the same price bracket have taken years to trade, even before sales slowed to a crawl amid continuing high interest rates for loans.
But the Nussdorfs paid $6.8 million for the property in 1997, according to the register, the equivalent of about $14 million when adjusting for inflation, and so appear to have nabbed a tidy profit.
In 2023, the median sale price of townhouses Manhattan-wide was $5.8 million, according to the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, while the properties required discounts of more than 6% to sell.
No. 14’s buyer was the limited-liability company Coriolanus, a nod perhaps to the banished Roman general and character in the Shakespeare tragedy of the same name. Signing the deed on behalf of the company was Victoria Black. The deal appears to have been all in cash; no mortgage is recorded in city records.
Adam Modlin, one of the brokers who marketed the property and the one who closed the deal, did not respond to a request for comment. And efforts to reach Nussdorf at his Long Island warehouse were unsuccessful by press time.
In 1961, Nussdorf’s parents, Bernard and Ruth, founded Quality King in Queens. It sells brand-name bath and beauty products at discounted prices to mom-and-pop-type retailers.
From the get-go, the business has benefited from the fact that U.S.-made shampoos, perfumes and pharmaceuticals are often sold overseas at lower prices than they are stateside. Because the products usually don’t require the same expensive marketing campaigns that they do here, the lower prices can be justified, analysts of the company have said.
For its part, Quality King would purchase the U.S.-made products in places such as Europe, then import them back to this country, reselling them to stores for more than they paid but less than what the domestic versions cost.
The “gray market” strategy hasn’t always gone over well: A hair care company sued Quality King in the late 1990s for undercutting its brands in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. But the court’s justices unanimously sided with Quality King, ruling essentially that distributors could set any prices they like for resold goods.
More recently, Quality King ended up in the news for allegedly jacking up the price of some Lysol products by as much as 50% to clients including a dollar store on the Lower East Side when there was a rush on disinfectants at the start of the pandemic.
The company ultimately paid a fine of $100,000 to New York state authorities for price gouging during an emergency. Nearly 1,500 disgruntled customers received checks in the settlement.