SL Green Realty has secured an $86 million senior mortgage loan for Landmark Square, an 826,000-square-foot mixed-use property in Stamford, Conn., Cushman & Wakefield Sonnenblick Goldman, which served as SL Green’s advisor on the deal, said today.

The five-year fixed-rate financing was provided by AIG Asset Management on behalf of a wholly owned life insurance subsidiary of American International Group, Cushman said.

Landmark Square sits on a 7.16-acre campus in the heart of Stamford’s Central Business District, and is comprised of seven buildings, including a nine-screen movie theater. — Katherine Clarke [more]

From the 2011 Data Book: See the complete analysis of distressed commercial properties in New York City and its suburbs from The Real Deal’s 2011 Data book. Click here or on the link at the top of the site to purchase a copy. TRD

Data Book 2011 Page 78 [more]

The site at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue and Newark Mayor Corey Booker

Mayor Corey Booker is expected to announce a deal with Stamford, Conn.-based Pitney Bowes tonight, which signed a seven-year lease to relocate its international mail distribution center to Newark, a deal that will bring 180 jobs to the city and provide for another 25 new jobs over the next five years. Pitney Bowes agreed to lease 76,000 square feet of space at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue, an existing Urban Enterprise Zone location that includes 64,000 square feet of production space and 12,000 square feet of office space. The new facility will be used to sort 50 million pieces of international mail per year.
UEZ was established by the state of New Jersey in 1983 to revitalize urban communities and stimulate growth by encouraging businesses to develop and create private sector jobs through investment. “This part of our business — a combination of international mail and the pre-sorting of domestic mail — has been a very rapidly growing part of Pitney Bowes,” said spokesperson Matthew Broder, in a telephone interview. “As the network has grown, we’ve been on a pretty constant search for facilities to keep up with it.” [more]

John Boyd, vice president with Boyd

New York City may be a corporate epicenter of the U.S., but it comes at a cost: the city is the most expensive place to locate a corporate headquarters office, according to a study from Boyd, a group specializing in corporate site selection. The average annual cost to operate a corporate office in New York City is $30.7 million, according to the study, with San Francisco taking the second place slot, with an annual cost of $29.3 million. Cities in the greater New York area, such as Stamford and Newark, clocked in at third and fifth places, respectively, with annual costs of $29 million and $27.9 million. The labor cost associated with each market was the leading factor influencing the overall price of corporate operations, according to the report, along with real estate-related costs. John Boyd, vice president with the firm, said that this information could lead to corporations’ exodus from high-cost regions. “The corporate headquarters arena is the next frontier of corporate cost cutting,” Boyd said, adding that many companies have already taken steps to move other facilities, such as warehouses and customer support centers. “The aim now is to restructure the headquarters office. It’s because of all these new enormous cost pressures.” [more]

After closing a blockbuster deal to relocate Starwood Hotels & Resorts from its White Plains headquarters to Stamford, Conn., outgoing Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy said the deal may be the first of several announcements over the next few weeks.

“We have deals that could be announced literally any day,” Malloy told The Real Deal.

Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell said this week that Starwood signed to relocate its corporate headquarters to a 250,000-square-foot space at Stamford’s new Harbor Point development at 333 Ludlow Street by January 2012. Starwood will team up with its new landlord, Building and Land Technology, to renovate the new space at a price of $40 million.

Starwood will save 20 percent in rent at its new headquarters, but officials declined to comment on specific prices. Existing tenants at the site include Deloitte & Touche and Pitney Bowes. According to a second-quarter report by Cushman & Wakefield, the average asking rent for Class A office space was $48.36 per square foot in downtown Stamford and $38.71 per square foot in the rest of the city. [more]