Having already ceded some of its demand to recent upstart office markets like Midtown South and downtown Manhattan, Midtown East is the subject of a Department of City Planning review intending to probe whether it needs to incentivize commercial property upgrades in the area, Crain’s reported.
Midtown East has more than 70 million square feet of office space, 13 Fortune 500 companies and about 250,000 jobs. [more]
With the exception of employers in New York City, Miami and other so-called “gateway cities,” U.S. office tenants can expect 2012 market conditions to remain very similar to those at the end of 2011, according to a report released today by tenant representation firm Cresa.
Tenants will continue to benefit from a relatively weak office market in most cities. [more]
Credit: PwC (click to enlarge)Real estate investors believe the office market is a smart investment play, as they project high tenant retention and rent growth in 2012, according to a fourth-quarter survey of investors released today by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Investors like the capitalization rates offered by office properties, as they remain “favorably priced” in many markets, according to Mitch Roschelle, a partner of PwC’s U.S. real estate advisory practice. “The bullishness on the part of investors in the office sector comes as more office tenants are staying put and prospects for rent growth are improving,” he said. – Adam Fusfeld
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Asking rents for Manhattan office space remain muted even as tenants have
inked deals for more space over the past six months than any time in more than
a decade.
For all types of Manhattan office buildings, average asking rents were up only
2 percent in the second quarter of 2011 compared with the same period a year
ago, or $1.21 per square foot to $55.52 per square foot, figures released by
Cushman & Wakefield today at its quarterly media briefing in Midtown, show. [more]
New York City office rentals got more expensive in the first quarter of 2011, even as vacancy and absorption rates remained mostly unchanged, according to separate reports released today by Cassidy Turley and Colliers International. Li & Fung’s rental in the Empire State Building, Lazard and Deloitte signing for space in 30 Rockefeller Center and Bloomberg LP’s move to 120 Park Avenue steered the strong market. The average asking rent in Manhattan rose to $50.18 per square foot from $48.62 per square foot, highlighted by a $2.14-per-square-foot jump in Midtown North, according to Colliers. The firm reported an availability rate of 11.7 percent, down 0.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010, and just 300,000 square feet of net absorption. TRD [more]
From the April issue: The 44-story tower at 1211 Sixth Avenue, home to Rupert Murdoch’s global media company News Corporation, is getting a major new tenant. Axis Re, a division of Axis Capital, the large Bermuda-based reinsurance company, signed a lease to move to 121,019 square feet on floors 24 through 26, data from CoStar Group shows. The asking rent for the three floors at the 1.8 million-square-foot tower, which is located between 47th and 48th streets, was $65 per square foot, leasing data website MrOfficeSpace.com shows. That price was a bit above the overall asking rent in Midtown, which in February was $57.97 per square foot, CBRE figures show. Click here to see the commercial market report in the April issue for more on the latest office trends.
From the March issue: Quirkily named Internet startups were dominant in last month’s Super Bowl advertising. Initial public offerings for these companies have recently been splashed throughout the business pages, and Wall Street analysts are valuing some of them in the range of tens of billions of dollars.
Then, of course, there’s the gorilla in the room, Google’s recent $1.9 billion purchase of 111 Eighth Avenue.
These days it seems you can’t escape that eerily familiar sense that we are back in the throes of another tech bubble. And a recent spate of commercial leasing deals in Manhattan involving technology firms — ranging from titans like Facebook and LinkedIn to upstarts like BuddyMedia, Foursquare and Tumblr — suggests that they are on something of a real estate tear. [more]
Furnished office provider Jay Suites has opened its fourth Manhattan location, the company announced today, at 30 Broad Street in the Financial District. As previously reported by The Real Deal Jay Suites, which offers flexible-term office spaces, will occupy the entire 14th floor of the Lower Manhattan building, which sits on the corner of Exchange Place. The company signed a 13-year lease for the 16,000-square-foot space. The rent is in the low $30s per square foot, according to Juda Srour, Jay Suites’ president. TRD
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With just 6.9 million square feet of office space, Long Island City is one of the smallest and most fragile commercial markets in the city, and “was greatly affected by the downturn,” Howard Kesseler of Newmark Knight Frank told Crain’s. But, he noted that “the market is starting to recover in terms of leasing activity.” In 2010, average office rents dropped 1 percent, according to Newmark’s latest report on the submarket. But things started to improve for the Queens neighborhood early last year, when JetBlue Airways leased more than 200,000 square feet at the MetLife building on the northern edge of the area. [more]
Midtown New York City is no longer the priciest office market in the Americas, after Rio de Janeiro’s average rents climbed 47 percent from this time a year ago, according to a Cushman & Wakefield international report released today. The report, which calculates the total average occupancy cost, shows that even as Midtown’s average rent climbed 10 percent to $115 per square foot, Rio de Janiero’s jump to $120 per square foot knocked Midtown out of the top spot in the Americas. Rio de Janeiro is the first South American location to accomplish this. TRD [more]
