350 Hudson Street (credit: PropertyShark)

PepsiCo has signed a five-year lease for a 19,800-square-foot space at 350 Hudson Street — its first office space in Manhattan, the New York Observer reported. [more]

277 Park Avenue (credit: PropertyShark)

Financial services company Sterne Agee has increased its New York office space at 277 Park Avenue by 50 percent, Crain’s reported. Stern Agee initially leased space at the 50-story tower in August 2011. It will now lease the building’s 26th floor for about 10 years. Rents in the building, which is largely occupied by JPMorgan Chase, are roughly in the $60s and $70s per square foot, Crain’s reported.

“At this point, we’re doing everything we can to grow,” William Holbrook, the chief operating officer of the Birmingham, Ala.-based firm, told Crain’s. “This opportunity came up and we took it.” [more]

Lower Manhattan office towers

Some 10 million to 15 million square feet of office space in Lower Manhattan has been taken offline by Hurricane Sandy. More than 10 percent of the Financial District’s 94 million square feet,  according to Jones Lang LaSalle tristate CEO Peter Riguardi, the New York Post reported. As The Real Deal told you last week, 1 New York Plaza and 55 Water Street, are just two examples of major downtown addresses where companies have been forced to leave by storm damage. [more]

Picnic tables under the Manhattan Bridge

As commercial rents in technology firm heavy Midtown South rise, smaller tech firms and start-ups are turning to communal work spaces or, in some cases, are eschewing office space altogether. According to the Wall Street Journal, each Thursday in August tech workers from a diverse set of companies will meet at picnic tables under the Manhattan Bridge to program, design and enjoy a beer. This non-traditional office space and free WiFi are provided by the office-sharing company Loosecubes and the Dumbo Improvement District in order to give fledgling tech firms a rent-free space to spread their wings. [more]

The city’s Economic Development Corp. and the Empire State Development Corp. are calling for developers to turn a Harlem parking garage into an office building and cultural center, the Wall Street Journal reported. The request for proposals, slated to be issued today, will seek a developer to build 300,000 square feet of space. [more]

Tenants and landlords quietly added millions of square feet to the Midtown market, pushing up the amount of available space by a sizable 2.1 million square feet in the first quarter, figures from commercial firm CBRE Group released today reveal. The newly available blocks of space fueled the largest amount of negative net absorption since the second quarter of 2009 in the midst of the economic slowdown, an analysis of CBRE data by The Real Deal shows. [more]

Nationwide, office space is filling up in downtown areas, while its counterpart in the suburbs remains vacant. “It’s a reversal of what we’ve been seeing in decades,” the Wall Street Journal’s Anton Troianovski says in the video above.
In the 1990s, the vacancy level was higher downtown than in the suburbs, but now downtown is leading the recovery in the office space market. “The downtown office market has stabilized, while the suburbs have lost about 280 football fields worth of space,” Troianovski said, which may be attributed to companies expanding and looking for more space.
… [more]

Office tenants in Midtown leased more space in November than in any month since the middle of 2006 as new office leasing rang in at double the monthly average, a new report covering all firms’ deals released today by commercial firm CB Richard Ellis shows.

“The month’s robust leasing activity — the largest single-month total since June 2006 — was achieved by deals of all sizes across the entire market,” the Midtown report says.

Tenants struck relocation or expansion deals for more than 2.4 million square feet in Midtown, compared with 1.2 million square feet the month before. TRD… [more]

While the global commercial real estate market remains tenuous, with Manhattan and Miami still struggling, Newmark Knight Frank’s 2010 Global real estate markets annual review shows that progress is being made, with several office markets around the globe having shown improvement by the end of 2009. Both the Manhattan and Miami office markets hobbled through the end of the year, according to the report, with Class A office space vacancy rates of 8.1 percent and 20.8 percent, respectively, by the end of the fourth quarter…. [more]

Downtown Brooklyn office real estate is suffering, according to Crain’s, with just three deals inked last year for 30,000 square feet of space or more. With lowered Manhattan rents putting up a fight and tenants looking to streamline their space, the Downtown Brooklyn market is hurting — and it’s tough to tell when it might rebound, according to Chris Havens, CEO of Creative Real Estate Group in Brooklyn. “The market is a mixed picture, with a vacancy rate that is lower than almost any major office market in America, but it’s a very slow-moving market,” Havens said.