Large office tenants scramble for space

New York City doesn’t have enough big chunks of office space to go around for all of the major tenants who are looking. According to Crain’s, there are 24 tenants currently on the hunt for at least 250,000 square feet in New York City and only 29 available blocks that fit the bill. But Cushman & Wakefield data shows that only 12 of those spaces are in the coveted Midtown area, and brokers say the crunch is shifting the office leasing market in landlords’ favor. At 120 Park Avenue, Wells Fargo was recently bumped despite a letter of intent to lease 280,000 square feet because Bloomberg LP swooped in to snag that space — plus an additional 120,000 square feet. Law firm Chadbourne & Parke had been considering a lease renewal at 30 Rockefeller Plaza when Deloitte scored a 436,000-square-foot lease at the building and the opportunity vanished. And WilmerHale had an agreement to take 200,000 square feet at 825 Eighth Avenue before the landlord began negotiating with the larger Nomura Holding America and pulled out of the original deal. The big-tenant scramble is good news for the owners of buildings like 11 Times Square, 3 Columbus Circle and 685 Third Avenue, which may be no longer need discounts to lure tenants to their huge amounts of vacant space, and for Larry Silverstein’s office towers planned for Ground Zero. [Crain’s]