From left: Grant Greenspan, 100-104 Fifth Avenue and 550 Seventh Avenue

Commercial real estate firms have only recently begun to abandon the marketing brochure for a social media presence, but it was only a matter of time before competition for tech tenants, among other factors, pushed commercial building owners to launch flashy websites reminiscent of their residential cousins. The New York Times reported that the Kaufman Organization has recently launched stylish standalone websites — featuring animation, exuberant language and videos — for two of its properties. [more]

From left: Grant Greenspan of Kaufman, Paul Milunec and Scott Gamber of CBRE, and 100-104 Fifth Avenue (credit: PropertyShark)

The online reviews site Yelp has signed a deal to take an additional 20,000 square feet at 100-104 Fifth Avenue between 15th and 16th streets, the New York Observer reported. All together, the San Francisco-based company will occupy a total of 29,505 square feet and continue New York’s Midtown South tech explosion.  [more]

More and more of the big technology companies are interested in space in Manhattan, in particular because of their desire to be near the advertising companies on Madison Avenue, the New York Times reported. During the upcoming Advertising Week, Yahoo will be able to present its new offices in Viacom’s Times Square building to potential advertising clients, in a way that it wasn’t able to do before.

Yahoo’s Times Square suite at 1540 Broadway has purple-hued conference rooms, a lobby with custom graphics and door pulls shaped like exclamation points, and a dynamic design that are symbolic of a high-tech company. … [more]

Having secured its long-anticipated lease at Grand Central Terminal, tech retailer Apple has been busy picking up leases for more office space in the city.

According to the New York Post, Apple has inked a 45,000-square-foot deal at the Kaufman Organizations’s 100-104 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District to accommodate its iAd mobile advertising division.

Apple moved into the space on a short-term lease for only 10,000 square feet in January, but always planned to extend it for a longer time, as the division’s head count grows from 20 to 60.

Apple also signed leases for the 14th floor, which includes 16,079 square feet, and a large part of the 15th floor, the Post said. The asking rent was $55 a square foot…. [more]

At left: 183 Madison Avenue; at right: 100-104 Fifth Avenue; top: Scott Pudalov; bottom: Alan Wildes

Two
former CB Richard Ellis brokers are suing British bank HBOS PLC to
block the sale of two Manhattan office buildings purchased at the
height of the real estate market, the Wall Street Journal reported. The
bank had been both an equity partner in and a lender to U.K.-based Rock
Joint Ventures when, like many foreign investment groups, it started
eyeing the U.S. real estate market in 2007. To help, the group enlisted
CBRE’s Alan Wildes and Scott Pudalov, each of whom say they were given
equity stakes in the two properties and promised the opportunity to
earn commissions from leasing, according to a complaint (see the full
document below). The group purchased the buildings in question — 183
Madison Avenue and 100-104 Fifth Avenue — in April 2007 for $107.5 million and in February 2008 for $152 million, respectively, according to the complaint. But when HBOS took over Rock in 2009
and began bankruptcy proceedings, the brokers claim they were wrongly
forced out of their roles and that mismanagement caused the buildings’
value to drop from a combined $320 million to $130 million between
January and August 2009. Now that the buildings are for sale — at a
depressed asking price — Wildes and Pudalov are seeking an injunction
to stop it and to appoint a receiver to handle the transaction. As the
Journal points out, the lawsuit raises the question of whether a
conflict of interest exists when a bank is both a lender and an
investor in the same entity. [WSJ]

Final Complaint

… [more]