Insurance firm takes 40K sf at Minskoff’s 1166 Sixth

Edward J. Minskoff Equities wooed an insurance company to move a few blocks south to its Sixth Avenue office tower.

Axis Insurance signed a lease for 40,000 square feet at 1166 Sixth Avenue, the Commercial Observer reported. The length and financial terms of the lease were not disclosed.

Axis is relocating from Ivanhoe Cambridge’s 1211 Sixth Avenue in the fourth quarter. The property is home to Fox and News Corporation, both of which renewed leases spanning 1.1 million square feet at the start of the year.

The insurance company will occupy the 17th floor, within the 20-floor condominium Minskoff owns. The developer recently added a conference center to its section of the property, along with a floor plate renovation.

A JLL team including Paul Glickman and Diana Biasotti represented the landlord, while a CBRE team including Michael Monahan and Mark Ravesloot represented Axis.

Minskoff has signed a number of new leases and renewals at the building in recent years, including a series of deals in late 2021 amounting to 120,000 square feet. The total included an expansion by financial services company William Blair to 80,000 square feet and the addition of international insurance firm Ryan Specialty Group, which took 40,000 square feet.

Minskoff completed a $50 million renovation of the building in 2017. Since then, the landlord scored $245 million in financing from Wells Fargo, consisting of a $186 million refinanced mortgage, a $47.4 million building loan and an $11.6 million project loan.

The property has a complicated ownership structure, split between Minskoff and Marsh McLennan. The latter recently signed real estate asset manager Cohen & Steers to a 15-year lease for 161,000 square feet in its portion of the property. The asking rent on that deal was $87 per square foot.

The Manhattan office market is still trying to recover from both the pandemic and a brutal fourth quarter, when tenants took fewer than 5 million square feet, according to Colliers.

— Holden Walter-Warner