Manhattan’s 10 largest office spaces on the market: PHOTOS

If you’re a giant corporate tenant shopping for Manhattan office space, Downtown is probably your best bet. The neighborhood had five of the 10 largest office spaces currently on the Manhattan market, according to an analysis of CoStar Group data carried out by Studley for The Real Deal.

In many cases, the largest Downtown spaces were asking considerably lower rents than spaces in markets such as Midtown, Midtown South and the West Side, the data show. For example, asking rents for the 17th to 27th floors at Brookfield Office Properties’ 225 Liberty Street Better Known As Brookfield Place — were between $60 and $65 per square foot, while asking rents for a similarly-sized space at Midtown’s McGraw-Hill Building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas – co-owned by the Canada Pension Plan and the Rockefeller Group — were between $78 and $93 per square foot, the data show.

The list of largest aggregate spaces on the market excludes under-construction buildings, such as those at Related Companies’ Hudson Yards, Silverstein Properties’ 4 World Trade Center and the Durst Organization’s One World Trade Center.

Brookfield Place at 250 Vesey Street — formerly known as the World Financial Center — has the largest amount of space up for grabs, with the building looking for tenants to take a total of 933,786 square feet of space, the data show.

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Some of the spaces are on the market because the landlord is looking to reposition the building, as in the case of the former Verizon building at 375 Pearl Street, which Sabey Data Center Properties purchased in 2011 to transform into the country’s tallest data center.

And SL Green Realty, which is looking to find a replacement for departing anchor tenant AIG at its Downtown office building at 180 Maiden Lane, is investing $50 million into upgrades such as a new lobby, new elevator cabs and a 200-person auditorium, according to Steven Durels, director of leasing at SL Green.

Others, such as Edward J. Minskoff Equities’ Fumihiko Maki-designed 360,000-square-foot building at 51 Astor Place, have been struggling to find tenants – indeed 51 Astor Place and its leasing woes have inspired a mock twitter account, “@51deathstar.”

George Shea, a spokesperson for 51 Astor Place’s leasing firm Jones Lang LaSalle, said that several leases totaling 40,000 square feet are out for the 280,000-square-foot office component of the building. (The remainder of the building consists of 55,000 square feet of educational space and 25,000 square feet of retail.)