New York City is so expensive it can sometimes feel like only the richest 15 people in the world can actually afford to live here. Well Property Shark crunched the numbers, and found that in fact if they wanted to, the richest 12 people in the world could afford to buy all of Manhattan real estate — and still have some money left over.
To be fair this claim, which is pretty stupendous, only includes residential real estate and does not take into account commercial spaces or infrastructure (both of which are significantly more expensive). Property Shark did their calculations by multiplying the average sales prices in neighborhoods for 2016 by the total number of residential units in that neighborhood. That gave them an approximate value for each neighborhood, which they appropriately divvied up between the twelve wealthiest people on Forbes billionaire list. According to their calculations, Manhattan residential real estate is worth a total of $578 billion. Here’s how it works out:
