Clockwise from top left: Cassidy Turley New York Tri-State’s Peter Hennessy, 330 Madison Avenue and Frank Doyle of JLLFinancial firm Guggenheim Partners has agreed to lease 186,000 square feet at 330 Madison Avenue for a rent in the $70s per square foot, the New York Observer reported. Guggenheim will move into the space when the lease for its approximately 140,000 square feet at 135 East 57th Street expires in 2013.

Vornado Realty Trust is the landlord at the 850,000-square-foot Madison Avenue tower, between 42nd and 43rd streets, and is spending more than $100 million to upgrade the building and secure a LEED Silver certification. [more]

From the August issue: Bureaucrats may soon find that their bureaus are just a little bit smaller.
As the city, state and federal governments tighten their belts, brokers are seeing them reduce the amount of office space they lease. And with several prominent government agencies studying ways to reduce their footprints further, some insiders are beginning to worry about the impact that those cuts are going to have on Manhattan’s commercial leasing market.
The uncertainty extends to some nonprofit organizations that depend on government funding, commercial agents said.
As of June 30, government, education and social services accounted for 7.6 percent of office space usage in Manhattan and 11.8 percent of new leasing, according to Cushman & Wakefield. While the numbers were largely stable from a year earlier, both the city and state are cutting jobs, and big tenants like the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are involved in high-profile consolidation efforts.
Brokers say government agencies are now putting every square foot in their portfolios under a magnifying glass. [more]

Harry Macklowe and 737 Park Avenue

From the June issue: Last month, developer Harry Macklowe signed a contract as the operating partner to buy the 108-unit rental apartment building 737 Park Avenue for $255 million, reports said.

The property, on the corner of 71st Street, is located on one of Manhattan’s most sought-after residential blocks, and that fact hasn’t escaped Macklowe’s notice. He has not formally announced plans, but sources say he intends to convert the building to luxury condominiums.

Once closed, Macklowe’s acquisition will be the most expensive residential building purchased for conversion since Maurice Mann and Africa Israel bought the Apthorp for $391 million in 2007, data from Real Capital Analytics shows. The deal marks the return of developers doing large-scale luxury condominium conversions following the real estate downturn. This month, The Real Deal took an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the 73-year-old property through rarely seen documents, usually shared only with a selective group of potential bidders. [more]

From the South Florida website: Jones Lang LaSalle is adding to its South Florida office leasing staff after signing on to market several new assignments in the region, according to GlobeSt.com. Among the new appointments are Peter Sheridan, who joins as senior vice president in the Fort Lauderdale office, and Nicole Vassilaros, who will be vice president in the downtown Miami office. The commercial brokerage announced earlier this week that it had been tapped as property manager for the CityPlace Tower in West Palm Beach. It is also handling leasing and management at the Southeast Financial Center and is the new property manager at the 47-story Miami Tower. [more]

Jones Lang LaSalle’s expanding investment sales team in the firm’s New York City Capital Markets group has picked up four more brokers: Eric Herlands, Jason Gold, Joseph Sitt and Stephen Shapiro. The firm announced today that the new hires will be working for the high-profile team of Richard Baxter, Jon Caplan, Ron Cohen and Scott Latham, who defected from Cushman & Wakefield to JLL last year in a deal sources said was valued at around $1 million per man. As The Real Deal reported last month, though, the pricey new team has yet to hit its stride, having done only around $200 million in property sales for JLL since its arrival. TRD [more]

From the March issue: On an island with 450 million square feet of office space, an early 20th-century Midtown building of less than 100,000 square feet is a drop in the bucket.

But in January, the 13-story 681 Fifth Avenue was one of the flash points in a frantic contest between commercial brokerage rivals Cushman & Wakefield and Jones Lang LaSalle. At issue was control of roughly 20 properties, in play because JLL poached five top leasing brokers from Cushman.

In that contest — which is still in full throttle — both sides are bringing out their big guns because every square foot counts. And while lost leasing revenue is the immediate concern, the potential to sell or manage a building down the road is always on a firm’s radar. [more]

From the February issue: A year and a half ago, the New York City hotel industry was hurting badly, as tourists cut back on spending and business travelers stopped calling to book rooms.

But times have changed. Indeed, the industry, while not back to where it was at the market’s peak, has done a 180 and is now rebounding stronger and faster than most had expected.

This month, The Real Deal talked to hotel experts not only about the key metrics for evaluating hotel performance, but also about development, hotel sales and a host of other crucial industry markers. [more]

Top row, from left: Mitchell Konsker, Paul Glickman, Mitti Liebersohn and Alex Chudnoff. Bottom row, from left: 99 Park Avenue, 1290 Sixth Avenue, 681 Fifth Avenue and 1411 Broadway

Following the exit by five major leasing brokers from Cushman & Wakefield to Jones Lang LaSalle last month, there has been a behind-the-scenes battle over who is the landlord leasing representative for millions of square feet of Manhattan office space that had been handled by Cushman.

In that contest, JLL has picked up at least three buildings owned by Midtown-based Eastgate Realty with more than 1.7 million square feet.

The buildings are the 550,000-square-foot 99 Park Avenue, the 530,000-square-foot 120 Park Avenue and 665,000-square-foot 875 Third Avenue, data from CoStar Group shows. [more]

Paul Formichelli, a senior vice president at Jones Lang LaSalle’s New York office, was elected as president of the New York chapter of NAIOP, a commercial real estate trade association for developers, landlords, owners and investors. Formichelli will serve a one-year term as head of the organization’s 2011 leadership team. Brian Robin, executive vice president and COO at Monday Properties, will serve as vice president of NAIOP. “I am deeply honored to have been elected,” said Formichelli. TRD [more]

Investment firm BHR Capital has signed a five-year lease for 8,800 square feet of office space at 545 Madison Avenue, according to the Observer. The new lease now puts the 140,000-square-foot building on the corner of 55th Street at 50 percent occupied. Although it wasn’t clear how much BHR is paying in rent, landlord LCOR said that rents at the building are now in the mid-to-upper-$70s. [more]