Studley preps new office for Monday debut

Challenging a general corporate trend toward more open work spaces, Studley is moving four blocks uptown on Park Avenue to a new location that gives nearly all of its agents their own private office.

The 56-year-old commercial real estate advisory firm is moving from 300 Park Avenue at 50th Street to 399 Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th streets, where it will occupy the entire 61,000 square feet of the 11th floor previously leased to Lehman Brothers.

The Real Deal took an exclusive first look at the office space being readied for its nearly 140 agents and employees.

The company officially closed its old office yesterday at the end of the day and plans to reopen for business at the new location Monday.

The trend of a more open plan is part social and part economic, with proponents saying it fosters more communication between colleagues, and with more workers per square foot, it helps the bottom line.

“Many folks are going to the open plan for efficiency and cost of real estate,” architect Scott Spector, principal with Midtown-based Spector Group, said.

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Commercial services firm Cushman & Wakefield, when it moved to its new location at 1290 Sixth Avenue last year, shifted some brokers from private offices to an open bullpen layout while senior directors and higher got their own offices.

Now about 60 percent of the firms brokers are in offices, a company spokesperson said.

Other firms, such as Massey Knakal Realty Services, have no private offices in their Manhattan location at 275 Madison Avenue, where all brokers work in bullpens.

“A lot of our competitors are moving in the direction of an open plan and we are going very much down the path of the traditional office. We feel people have to fill a majority of their time in the office and need to be happy,” Michael Colacino, president of Studley, said.

“We don’t have an industrial view of our space like some of our competitors have,” he said.