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Extra, extra! New York Times sublets 140K sf at Eighth Ave. HQ
“Dark pool” trading network Liquidnet takes space at 620 Eighth Avenue
The New York Times found a tenant to lease roughly half the space it put on the sublet market at its Eighth Avenue headquarters last year, sources told The Real Deal.
Liquidnet, a trading network that specializes in private “dark pool” exchanges, inked a deal to sublease a little more than 140,000 square feet of the media company’s space at 620 Eighth Avenue, sources familiar with the deal said.
Terms of the lease were not immediately clear, but the asking rent for the space was $78 per square foot.
A spokesperson for the New York Times Company declined to comment, and a representative for Liquidnet did not respond to a request for comment.
Liquidnet, founded in 2001, is currently headquartered a few blocks away at George Comfort & Sons’ 498 Seventh Avenue, where it signed a deal in 2005 to expand to 100,000 square feet in the building. The company in 2013 sublet nearly 30,000 square feet of its space to digital media firm Alloy Digital.
Mitch Konsker at JLL represented Liquidnet in its deal with the Times. Andrew Sachs at Newmark Knight Frank negotiated on behalf of the newspaper company.
The Times put 250,000 square feet up for sublease about a year ago as it scaled back its footprint in the 52-story tower that bears its name as a cost-savings measure.
In the meantime, the Times signed a sublease deal with Time, Inc. at 1271 Sixth Avenue to occupy roughly 160,000 square feet while it overhauls its space on Eighth Avenue, as TRD originally reported.
The newspaper partnered with Forest City Ratner Companies to develop the Renzo Piano-designed, 1.8 million-square-foot tower in 2007, and just two years later it sold part of its interest in the building to W.P. Carey for $225 million in a sale-leaseback deal. The Times disclosed its annual lease payment to be $24 million a year, or $32 per square foot. The term on its lease runs through 2024, according to CoStar Group.