For nearly 20 years, Marisa Lalli bounced from one Manhattan rental to the next. She even tried a year in Philadelphia, which only convinced her that New York was where she wanted to be.
The problem, she said, was that she “couldn’t have bought a dream apartment without a winning Powerball ticket.”
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In 2023, Ms. Lalli’s father was diagnosed with cancer, and she spent the next year traveling between New York and her hometown of Hershey, Pa., to care for him. Michael Lalli had started out as a mechanic at the Hershey Chocolate factory and worked his way up to management, saving enough along the way to buy a house in Hershey and a townhouse on the Delmarva Peninsula.
“My dad was an old Italian gentleman and he didn’t necessarily share a lot, so we didn’t have a lot of talks about goals and life,” said Ms. Lalli, 42, who works in public relations. “As the cancer took its toll, my dad made it clear that he wanted me to prioritize buying a place when he passed on. It was a really hard time, but it did give us opportunities to talk about the future in a really honest way.”
Mr. Lalli died in August 2024, leaving Ms. Lalli and her brother some money and the two properties, which they sold. By this time, she was renting a one-bedroom in a Lincoln Square high-rise for $4,600 a month, “trying to reestablish some kind of sense of normalcy after spending so much time in caretaking mode,” she said.
With the inheritance plus savings, she could now afford a down payment on the Upper West Side, where she wanted to stay. She looked for a dog-friendly doorman building, preferably in the high West 60s or low West 70s and close to Central Park, for less than $1 million.
Feeling unprepared to buy a place, she connected with Emily Yaffe, an associate broker at Serhant. “New York City is a different beast,” Ms. Lalli said. “Getting my paperwork together was overwhelming.”
“Marisa was specific in her criteria and we narrowed her hunt to a few-block radius,” Ms. Yaffe said. “The inventory was very low. If you want to spend under a million and live in that neighborhood, you have only a few buildings to choose from.”
Condominium prices were out of reach, so they focused on co-ops.
This north-facing one-bedroom, one-bath unit had nearly 800 square feet, with an open living-dining area, five closets, an ugly bathroom, a dated kitchen with a pass-through and an 80-square-foot balcony accessible from the bedroom. The 32-story doorman building offered a landscaped roof deck, a laundry room, a gym and a courtyard, and was the closest to Central Park of the three options. Construction on a skyscraper down the street was getting underway and could continue for years. The unit, initially listed at almost $1.2 million, had lingered on the market. When Ms. Lalli saw it, the price was $985,000, with monthly maintenance between $2,300 and $2,400.
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