Kiddie Music Mogul to Flip $7.96 M. Upper West Side Condo

If you’ve co-founded the biggest preteen music phenomenon since the Backstreet Boys, and you also happen to have a record label that’s made cheesy but enormously well-selling compilations (Monster Ballads, Goin’ South), it’s all right if you spend nearly $8 million on a three-unit apartment and then, before spending a night there, decide you don’t quite want it anymore.

Cliff Chenfeld, the 48-year-old lawyer and music entrepreneur who helped launch the tectonically successful Kidz Bop concert tour and CD series (as of last year, the first 12 volumes had sold over 10 million copies, and two more have since been released), paid $7,965,000 for a 14-room, 5,200-square-foot loft at 219 West 81st Street last month.

Despite the loft’s Zuma soaking tubs, chiseled marble, custom flooring and “pearlescent lacquer vanity millwork” (a phrase from the listing that may or may not have been written in iambic pentameter), Mr. Chenfeld will almost certainly be putting the place back on the market shortly.

“It’s an incredible space,” he said, reached at his music company Razor & Tie, which also puts out curiously well-selling home videos (Darrin’s Dance Grooves, the gospel-fitness hybrid Sweating in the Sprit), “and it’s fabulous, but I think I’m going to move downtown in a year and a half.”

Mr. Chenfeld and his wife, Chana, who live on the Upper West Side, where they threw an Obama fund-raiser with folk-pop chanteuse Dar Williams this February, signed their contract for the apartment back in June 2007. Since last year, one of their sons has decided to go to school downtown, and another might join him.

“So to kind of go through the entire thing of getting a 5,000-square-foot apartment furnished, getting everything together, and then deciding I want to leave ultimately didn’t make sense,” he said. The family hasn’t spent a night in the new place. “No, we haven’t, nope. I can’t sleep there, it’s not built out.”

He imagines he’ll put the place back on the market somewhere between $9 and $10 million, even though it was easier last year to flip an apartment for a quick seven-digit profit. “Sure, I wish it was then; it would be a lot better,” Mr. Chenfeld said. “But I’m fairly optimistic we’ll be in good shape.”

mabelson@observer.com