From left: Cassidy Turley Tri-State President Peter Hennessy, Colliers International Tri-State President Michael Cohen, Andrew Lance, partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Stephen Meister, partner of Meister Seelig & Fein

New York City’s commercial property insiders are digesting the news that Midtown-based finance and property brokerage firm BGC Partners has agreed to buy the assets of the battered national services firm Grubb & Ellis.

They say the acquisition, which Federal Bankruptcy Court documents value at about $34.8 million plus additional, undefined amounts, would bring stability to the California-based Grubb. [more]

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]

The New York City Human Resources Administration has inked a 20-year lease for 400,000 square feet at a 10-story building at 470 Vanderbilt Avenue in the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn, the New York Times reported, in what is, so far, the biggest real estate deal in Brooklyn in 2011 and brings the building to 85 percent occupancy.

“The building is huge — an entire city block — and it has basically sat vacant and derelict for years,” said Steven Hurwitz, the vice president of acquisitions and developments at GFI Development, the company that owns the ground lease. It was not immediately clear how this lease fits in with the administration’s previously reported plans to move into 4 World Trade Center. [more]

Manhattan’s largest commercial leases are getting even larger, according to a report from Jones Lang LaSalle. The group said that the median commercial lease size on spaces greater than 10,000 square feet has reached its highest level since the beginning of 2008. This quarter, thus far, is seeing the median size of commercial space leased at 40,000 square feet, while the first quarter of 2008 was at a median of around 30,000 square feet. Despite this, recent reports have suggested that the commercial market may continue to suffer and Jones Lang LaSalle Director Peter Hennessy cautioned against reading too much into the report. “It’s too early to say things are improving,” Hennessy said. But deals over 100,000 square feet are getting done. As The Real Deal reported earlier this month, there were four leases over 100,000 square feet in Midtown last month, that together made up 57 percent of all lease deals over 100,000 square feet done this year, according to Pamela Murphy, senior vice president for research at CBRE’s tri-state region.