111 Eighth Avenue, which is owned by Google
The much-hyped ascendance of the technology sector in New York City, and especially in Midtown South, has officially arrived, as the New York Post reported. Top-shelf companies such as Facebook, Amazon and IBM are shopping for space in Chelsea, the Meatpacking District and the Flatiron area, the paper said. [more]
Facebook will expand its New York City presence, COO Sheryl Sandberg announced at a press conference at the company’s offices at 335 Madison Avenue today, Crain’s reported.
The social media giant’s Manhattan office, at 45th Street, currently employs 100 people, working in advertising sales, global recruiting and marketing. Facebook will add an engineering division, making New York City only the second office outside of Palo Alto where Facebook employs technology talent.
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. Comments
From the June issue: In past years, many New Yorkers depended on the searchable classified ad service Craigslist.org to help them find affordable apartments, often without brokers’ fees. But these days, many are trading hours of scrolling through apartments on Craigslist for posting housing queries in the form of status updates on Facebook or Twitter.
For the consumer, social media is a way of avoiding the possibility that what’s advertised on Craigslist may not really be what’s available. For the broker, it’s a new opportunity for marketing.
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Are you on Facebook? Want to be in the know on real estate goings-on? Well, become a fan of The Real Deal on Facebook and see fun photos, articles and interesting factoids, like that Lev Leviev bought a pink diamond for $10.8 million and that the days of smoking in New York City parks were over as of yesterday. TRD
Facebook has inked a deal to lease two floors at Milstein Properties’ 335 Madison Avenue — the former Biltmore Hotel, between 43rd and 44th streets — and could expand to as much as 150,000 square feet there, sources told the New York Times. That’s enough to house up to 600 employees, at a time when the social network is reportedly getting ready for an aggressive hiring push for new advertising sales representatives in the city. Currently, the company has 15 open positions in New York and a 5,700-square-foot office in Midtown that’s already overcrowded. [NYT]
Facebook has swapped its old office at 551 Fifth Avenue between 45th and 46th streets for a new 11,119-square-foot office space just a few blocks away, at 340 Madison Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. A Facebook representative said that they moved for purely practical reasons. “As we expanded our team in New York, we simply outgrew our old space,” Meredith Chin, a Facebook spokesperson, said. Daniel Katcher of Newmark Knight Frank, who represented sublandlord Sunguard, described the space as “a nice mix between corporate, tech and loft offices” that will primarily house Facebook’s sales team. Broadway Partners purchased the 340 Madison Avenue building in 2006 for $550 million.
