From left: Tory Burch and 350 Hudson Street (credit: PropertyShark)
Luxury fashion designer Tory Burch has inked a 10-year lease for 80,000 square feet at 350 Hudson Street in Hudson Square, GlobeSt.com reported. The space encompasses the building’s entire fifth and sixth floors. [more]
75 Rockefeller Plaza
A lesser-known Rockefeller tower, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, could be shopping for new tenants, Crain’s reported.
Time Warner has been managing the 34-story building since 1993, although none of its employees currently work there, a spokesperson told Crain’s. Time Warner subleases the space to a variety of tenants, including tk, and its lease is up in 2014. Sources said Time Warner will not be renewing its lease. The owner, investor Mohamed Al-Fayed, wants a tenant who will lease and manage the space, and has enlisted Cushman & Wakefield to find one, Crain’s said. Time Warner representatives declined to comment to Crain’s. [more]
Bruce Mosler, chairman of Global Brokerage for Cushman & Wakefield, has been appointed as chair of the new Executive Education Advisory Board of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the institution announced today.
“I am very pleased to expand my commitment to Wharton, to engage the educators and business leaders who are addressing the leadership challenges of the new economy and to improve our collective impact on business and society,” Mosler, a Wharton alumnus, said in a statement. – Miranda Neubauer [more]
Hints of weakness in the Manhattan office leasing market stuck out in a generally positive report on property conditions, provided this morning by executives of commercial services firm Cushman & Wakefield.
Average asking rents were up overall and leasing velocity, although down sharply from last quarter, was still in the traditional range.
“We are right now back to a normal market in terms of leasing velocity,” said Joseph Harbert, COO of Cushman’s New York office, at the quarterly media briefing in Midtown. “We had a great first quarter and we had a great second quarter. It is a healthy market.”
Yet there were causes for concern. The vacancy rate for Midtown Class A properties rose by .1 points to 10.6 percent, and Harbert noted that in the last quarter there had been negative net absorption in some areas of Manhattan. [more]
TF Cornerstone signed a 15-year lease to bring Potbelly Sandwich Shop, a Chicago culinary institution, to 2 Gold Street in the Financial District, the chain restaurant’s first New York location. Potbelly’s snapped up the last available retail space in the building, joining Pret-A-Manger, Goodburger, and Hot Clay Oven. Carl Wunderlich and Mike Stone of Cushman and Wakefield represented the landlord while Jeff Roseman, Marc Frankel and Ben Birnbaum of Newmark Knight Frank, represented the tenant in the transaction. TRD [more]
Swiss watch retailer Swatch signed a 15-year lease today valued at $80 million for the
remaining 2,000-square-foot ground-floor retail space in the commercial condominium
at 666 Fifth Avenue owned by a joint venture of the Carlyle Group, Kushner Companies
and Crown Acquisitions, sources close to the deal said.
The rent for the space with a 20-foot wide frontage squeezed between Hollister and
Uniqlo, was approximately $2,000 per square foot, the source said. Bradley Mendelson, a
top retail broker at Cushman & Wakefield, represented the landlord. [more]
Li & Fung, a Hong Kong-based trading company, signed a lease yesterday for 490,000 square feet in the Empire State Building, the largest deal of the new year and one which would have also topped last year’s list, the Post reported. The deal comes after months of negotiation between the landlord and tenant. The lease includes several floors in the base of the building, which has asking rents ranging from the mid-$40s a square foot to the high $50s, according to CoStar. Anthony Malkin, president of W&H Properties, which owns the Empire State Building, declined to comment, as did Li & Fung.
[more]
Many make a profession of foreseeing the future: meteorologists and fortune-tellers, among others. But there are few harder industries to predict than real estate, even for market experts. And after 2009′s battering, few ventured a guess on 2010′s outcome. As The Real Deal‘s Editor-in-Chief Stuart Elliott noted in January 2010, “if we were to turn a corner, we wouldn’t know it until we did.” But, as we did last year, The Real Deal has looked at the most noteworthy predictions of the year to determine just how right — or wrong — those forecasts were. [more]
Worldwide Plaza at 825 Eighth Avenue
WNET, the parent company of public television’s Channel 13, has signed a 95,000-square-foot lease at Worldwide Plaza at 825 Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, taking two floors in the 1.8 million-square-foot tower, the Post reported. Terms for the Worldwide Plaza lease were not released, but asking rents there run from $52 to $59 a square foot. The deal marks an important step forward for the building, which was purchased last year from Deutsche Bank for $605 million by a George Comfort & Sons-led partnership after Deutsche took it back from Harry Macklowe. The WNET deal is the first section being leased out of the 640,000 square feet that became available after advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather moved out in 2009 (note: correction appended). WNET will move from its current corporate headquarters at 450 West 33rd Street by the end of the year. WNET was represented by Cushman & Wakefield’s Charles Borrok and Barry Zeller in the transaction. The landlord was represented in-house by Peter Duncan, George Comfort CEO and president, and Matthew Coudert, executive vice president. [Post, 1st item]
Commercial brokers experiencing the worst real estate environment in a
generation got a breakfast pep talk from leading executives at a real
estate panel today but heard divergent views on when the market will
hit bottom. Matt VanBuren, senior managing director at full service commercial firm
CB Richard Ellis, provided a relatively optimistic viewpoint, holding
that the city is near the bottom of the downward cycle. “Our perspective is that we are at an inflection point, and that the
majority of the downward price movement has occurred,” he said, adding
that the overall health of financial and legal firms remained critical
to a recovery. [more]
