Amazon founder Jeff Bezos splurges more than $114m on luxury New York apartments

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is set to splurge on three apartments in a luxury building on Manhattan’s ritzy Fifth Avenue for an eye-watering price.

The penthouse apartment and two others directly underneath it are being bought for $US80 million ($A114,338,400), The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the transaction.

The sale is a record for the area south of Midtown’s 42nd Street, real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller told the WSJ.

Mr Miller said it was the second largest deal closed in New York this year.

Hedge-fund boss Ken Griffin’s $A333 million purchase of a penthouse in a building at 220 Central Park South had been the largest sale of 2019 so far.

Mr Bezos reportedly got himself a good deal with the penthouse alone listed in 2017 for $US73.8 million.

It was re-listed for $US58 million, according to the WSJ. The other two apartments had sold for a total of $US28.45 million.

The pricey purchase could see the multibillionaire, currently based outside Seattle, get a huge new home if he chooses to live there. If the three apartments are combined they would take up a massive 1579 square metres in size and include 12 bedrooms.

The combined home would be bigger than the apartment for sale at 150 Clarendon Street, East Melbourne, which is currently on the market for $46 million. It has four bedrooms.

Mr Bezos is the founder, chief executive and chairman of online shopping giant Amazon. He recently divorced his wife of 25 years, novelist MacKenzie Bezos, with newspapers claiming it was a record-breaking settlement between the couple.

He had been looking for a home in New York for some time and the company recently abandoned plans to build a new campus in the city after facing opposition from locals.

The WSJ reported that real estate broker John Burger of Brown Harris Stevens represented Mr Bezos in the buy. Nikki Field, Brad Ingalls, Mara Flash Blum and Kevin B. Brown of Sotheby’s International Realty were the listing agents, according to New York real estate site StreetEasy.

Mr Bezos’s current wealth has been estimated at $US106 billion ($151.783 billion). He reportedly owns at least five other properties They include homes in Beverly Hills, Washington, west Texas and Medina outside Seattle in the US. He also reportedly owns another apartment in New York.

While the sale is a record for its neighbourhood, it’s not the heftiest price paid for a property.

Aside from the recent New York deal overlooking Central Park, a Hong Kong home in the city’s The Peak district that hadn’t been constructed changed hands for a then $A358 million in 2016.

The 5630-square-metre property at 15 Gough Hill Road was scheduled to be completed by the end of 2016, and was bought by billionaire tycoon Chen Hongtian.