I think you may have missed the point of the offer. They have no way of knowing the details of your current lease, only that you have a New York address. I think the idea is that when your current lease expires you might consider their property. The points are a tie-breaker, not a reason to rearrange your life.
I think you miss the point. You can get primer properties for the same or less rent.
Sure its an incentive upon the going rate and if you wanted to lease this property anyways you would just get a small percentage worth of bonus points.
There are literally thousands of different architects and buildings in Manhattan with loads of differing offerings. Everything from Converted garages to brownstones to luxury highrises and walkups and everything inbetween.
I wasn't paying attention to new rental properties in Manhattan, in fact its not something I would ever be interested in. From a business perspective its very profitable for the Related Group. Yes I have heard of the team before involved in this building. When it comes to building development you often hear a lot of the same names especially if you look at new buildings coming out via Street Easy or Emporis. While there are loads of fresh teams and new blood, you need a lot of development and funding and so there aren't as many teams in the business as you would think since everyone works in large teams and there aren't a zillion firms out there.
But sending these flyers out to literally millions of Amex Cardholders boggles the mind from a marketting perspective since most of their cardholders wouldn't be interested. I don't know how extensively they sent this promotion or who they marketted to and why I (who lives in NYC but not in Manhattan) would be targetted for such offer.
Surely if I was in the market for such a rental property, I wouldn't be relying on an Amex promotion to get one. And just having one single property by the Related Group to use for this offering seems nuts to boot.
Sometimes you wonder what marketting teams are really thinking when they do something and what their rationale is.
If someone was indeed renting a new unit and wanted this building and mid town, then it does seem very likely they would indeed get the 50,000 points and charge their rental fees using their cards. But it seems to be so isolated to a single building by a single developer and not a good deal.
Obviously a building wouldn't build a new project if they didn't project they would get high occupancy rates and usually rentals do get rented out. But with so much competition for property around the world, this campaign doesn't cut the mustard.