From left: Bradley Mendelson of Cushman & Wakefield, Faith Hope Consolo of Prudential Douglas Elliman and Laura Pomerantz of PBS Real EstateCompiled by Adam Pincus

This year retail pricing improved broadly, including reaching a record $3,000 per foot asking rent on Upper Fifth Avenue. At the same time, landlords and their agents ramped up leasing at large mall-like sites in Lower Manhattan. Yet weak areas such as stretches of the Upper East Side were a drag on the market. As the year comes to a close, The Real Deal asked some of Manhattan’s leading retail leasing brokers what they expect for 2012. See what they had to say after the jump. [more]

Faith Hope Consolo of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the High Line and Stuart Siegel of Grubb & Ellis

Retailers are flocking to the Meatpacking District to take advantage of High Line-inspired foot traffic. The elevated half-mile long park between Gansevoort Street and, as of this spring, 34th Street attracted 3 million visitors within a year of opening in June 2009. (The Empire State Building has about 3.7 million visitors a year.) International perfumery Bond No. 9 is the latest retailer to join the pack, signing a 1,000-square-foot lease last week for its fifth New York City location at 863 Washington Street, between 13th and 14th streets. Richard Skulnik, a broker at Ripco Real Estate who specializes in properties in the Meatpacking District, said mainstream retailers recognize they need to be near the High Line. [more]

From the October issue: As if today’s leasing market wasn’t challenging enough, New York’s
commercial real estate brokers have one more thing to contend with:
demanding landlords. Whether it is an increase in the number of phone calls, requests for
weekly face-to-face meetings, or a sudden mandate of updated daily
reports on individual properties, all over town there are more stories
of landlords who now want up-to-the-minute information on what their
respective brokers are doing to fill their space. And in some quarters, this newfound neediness is starting to grate. “It’s a pain in the ass,” said a broker at one of the top firms who
asked to remain anonymous. “Landlords are micromanaging the process and
you need a lot of handholding and a lot of paper.

From the September issue: The term “vulnerable” is not typically associated with the alpha dogs
of New York City’s high-powered commercial real estate world. But that
is precisely how a number of top commercial firms are feeling these
days, and to compensate, they are taking extra measures to ensure that
landlords can’t stiff them.
An increasing number of brokers are having legal language inserted
into their contracts stating that if their commission is not paid by a
certain date, it will come from the tenant they worked with, instead of
the landlord. The “rent in lieu of commission” clause, as it is
unofficially known, is structured so the payment won’t cost the tenant
a dime; rather, it will simply be deducted from the rent they would
otherwise pay to the landlord. Last month one of the city’s top brokerage firms issued a 10-point
memo to its commission-based employees explaining ways that they can
best protect their spoils. [more]

Two years ago, demand for air rights was, well, through the roof. “For residential use at the peak of the market, [air rights] were between $400 and $500 a square foot,” said Stuart Siegel, executive managing director at commercial real estate firm Grubb & Ellis.

The rights, often called development rights by those in the industry, were being traded by everyone from real estate giants like the Related Companies to small-time developers. The goal: to erect ever-taller buildings, with which to pull in more income.

Stephen Lefkowitz, a partner at Fried Frank, which handled the transfer of several hundred thousand square feet of air rights from the St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue to the MoMa Tower to be built at 53 West 53rd Street, noted that at the time sales for air rights were “very active.” more