Chinese Mom Buys $6.5 Million New York City Apartment for 2-Year-Old

Extravagant display of wealth or good planning?

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Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images

Construction continues on the One57 luxury condominium building in Manhattan on Jan. 7, 2013

Think you’re spoiling your child? Think again. A CCTV story is making international headlines after a New York City real estate agent revealed that a Chinese mother purchased a $6.5 million apartment for her toddler.

Sotheby’s senior vice president Kevin Brown told China’s CCTV that he showed apartments all over Manhattan to the buyer, who is remaining anonymous:

And she said, well, her daughter was going to go to Columbia, or NYU, or maybe Harvard, and so she needed to be in the center of the city and that was why she was picking this one particular apartment. So I said: ‘Oh, how old is your daughter?’ And she said: ‘Well, she’s 2’. And I was just shocked.

The woman ended up buying in the luxury Manhattan building One57. The 90-story building, which is still unfinished, was designed by a Pritzker Prize–winning architect and will have a library with a pool table and 7.3-m aquarium, a private concert hall and a “pet washroom” along with an enviable location on 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.

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While some may scoff at the over-the-top purchase, the anonymous mother could be a very savvy real estate investor. According to Brown, less than two years after her purchase at One57, the condo’s value has already shot up to $8.9 million.

In China, the purchase has tongues wagging about where the money could have come from. According to the Telegraph, comments left on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, suggested that the woman must have been related to a corrupt government official. In a country where income inequality is widening and anger at the extravagant ways of Communist Party officials is growing, the country’s new President Xi Jinping has made combating corruption and official abuse of power a priority.

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