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.
A mural decorates a bedroom ceiling in the condominium just sold by Rush Limbaugh.
Picture: Corcoran
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.
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 apartment's 30-foot-wide living room
Picture: Corcoran
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.
Mr. Limbaugh's condo building on East 86th Street near Fifth Avenue
Picture: Alfred Giancarli for The Wall Street Journal
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.
Write to Josh Barbanel at josh.barbanel@wsj.com
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