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United States News Title: Limbaugh Gets Mega Millions on Condo Sale Limbaugh Gets Mega Millions on Condo Sale By JOSH BARBANEL A year after railing about the high tax burden on wealthy New Yorkers, Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk-show host, is severing one more tie with New York, selling his lushly decorated Fifth Avenue penthouse to an undisclosed buyer. Mr. Limbaugh's 10-room condominium, which features a 30-foot-wide living room with fireplace and four terraces overlooking Central Park at East 86th Street, went into contract Thursday for a bit under the final $12.95 million asking price, brokers said. View Full Image Corcoran A mural decorates a bedroom ceiling in the condominium just sold by Rush Limbaugh. .One broker familiar with the transaction said the final price was about $11.5 million. Mr. Limbaugh paid just under $5 million for the apartment as well as a maid's room and a storage locker, in 1994. At that price, city officials said that the sale would usually trigger a payment from the seller at the closing of about $325,000 in transfer taxes, including about $164,000 for New York City and $161,000 for New York state to help close the state's huge budget deficit. Last year when New York state adopted a temporary income-tax surcharge to raise more than $3 billion a year, Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show that he was going to "get out of New York totally" and sell his Manhattan apartment. A Web transcript of the show is titled "El Rushbo to New York: Drop Dead." Mr. Limbaugh didn't return a call for comment. View Full Image Corcoran he apartment's 30-foot-wide living room .On the radio last week, he railed again against high property taxes, and predicted that basketball star LeBron James would bypass New York, and join a team in a place like Miami to save $12 million to $20 million a year in state income taxes he might have to pay in New York. Mr. Limbaugh put the full-floor apartment—which includes a private elevator entrance and is the largest apartment in the building—on the market in February with an asking price of $13.95 million. The listing by Haidee Granger and Stuart Moss of Corcoran Group shows a richly decorated space with ornate, hand-painted ceiling murals, and walls upholstered in silk damask. A paneled study has a gold-leaf ceiling. Although the studios for his radio network are in New York, Mr. Limbaugh has been mostly broadcasting from Florida, where he has a sprawling Palm Beach mansion, since the late 1990s. A mural on one wall in the New York apartment shows palm trees and waves crashing on a beach. View Full Image Alfred Giancarli for The Wall Street Journal Mr. Limbaugh's condo building on East 86th Street near Fifth Avenue .He has said on the air that after facing regular state tax audits over many years, he was spending only 15 days a year, mainly during the hurricane season, in New York. In April, the asking price on the 4,661-square-foot apartment on the 20th floor was cut by $1 million. The Corcoran brokers, Ms. Granger and Mr. Moss, declined to comment on the transaction. But property records show that Mr. Limbaugh has been a beneficiary of rising property values in the city since 1994. At the time he purchased the apartment, the real-estate market was at the end of a huge decline. The building, the former Adams Hotel, had just been converted to condominiums. During the conversion, the developers received city permission to use a Fifth Avenue address, even though the building is located on East 86th Street, a hundred feet from the avenue.
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