Norway’s biggest bank leaves MetLife for 30 Hudson Yards

Norway’s largest bank is moving from Midtown to the Related Companies’ 30 Hudson Yards, where the lender has signed a lease for 44,000 square feet on one of the building’s tower floors.

The Oslo-based DNB ASA inked 15-to-20-year lease for the entire 68th floor of the 80-story tower that is still under construction, Bloomberg reported.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

DNB is relocating from a smaller footprint at Tishman Speyer’s [TRDataCustom] MetLife Building, where the bank has been on the 31st floor since 1995.

Related last year drew private-equity firm KKR to 30 Hudson Yards from the Solow building at 9 West 57th Street, considered to be one of the premier corporate addresses in the city. That “sent a signal that it’s considered appropriate by the leaders of the industry to move out of Midtown,” said Jay Cross, president of Related’s Hudson Yards unit.

“In the early days of the Yards, our market was to go after people like Coach — fashion, media, those industries that were a little more flexible in terms of their location, and maybe a little more adventuresome,” Cross added. “We always felt that cracking the code of Midtown was going to be our biggest challenge.”

When finished in 2019, 30 Hudson Yards will be the second-tallest tower in New York at 1,296 feet tall.

DNB’s new office will be on one of the floors Related had planned to take for itself. The developer last year said it would take nearly 300,000 square feet across six floors near the top of the tower, as The Real Deal originally reported. [Bloomberg] – Rich Bockmann