Aon weighs move to new office Downtown

Insurance giant is searching the submarket for more than 200K sf

Gregory Case and 199 Water Street
Gregory Case and 199 Water Street

Insurance giant Aon Corp. is considering relocating its current offices from Jack Resnick & Sons’ 199 Water Street, and is keeping the search within the Downtown submarket, sources told The Real Deal.

The U.K.-based firm has a lease expiring in 2018 at the 35-story building, where it occupies around 400,000 square feet.

Aon is checking out buildings in Lower Manhattan for a space sources said is north of 200,000 square feet, though renewing at the 1.17 million-square-foot Resnick tower is also an option.

John Nugent at CBRE is leading the search. He declined to comment, and a representative for Aon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Aon had been a tenant in the original World Trade Center, where it lost 176 employees on 9/11.

In the aftermath, the company headed to Midtown where it opened an office at Fisher Brothers’ 55 East 52nd Street between Madison and Park Avenues. The firm also kept a small office at 199 Water and consolidated its workforce there in 2006, but had to temporarily return to Midtown six years later after Superstorm Sandy damaged buildings in Lower Manhattan.

Downtown landlords have been repricing available blocks of space upward in older, pre-2000 buildings all year long as lower-cost options become more scarce. Sublet space in Downtown is almost non-existent at 1.3 percent, the tightest availability in Manhattan.