ESRT braces for more pain at Empire State Building
Business networking platform LinkedIn has signed a seven-year deal to lease the Empire State Building’s entire 25th floor, Crain’s reported. The fast-expanding company, which is currently subleasing a much smaller office on the same floor and has several other temporary office locations around the city, will consolidate and expand into its new 31,000-square-foot space. In recent months, social media companies have been flocking to areas like Hudson Square and Park Avenue South, but LinkedIn said its employees liked the Empire State. The deal is a coup for the Malkin family, the owner and asset manager of the city’s most famous office building, which is still mostly filled with hundreds of tiny, mom-and-pop tenants. As The Real Deal chronicled in a profile of the building last month, the Malkins have been furiously trying to transform the 2.9 million-square-foot property into one that attracts the kind of big-name, big-money tenants that its 80-year history can command. “I’m pinching myself,” said Anthony Malkin, president of Malkin Holdings. “Five years ago, I never would have believed we would have had a tenant like this.” The asking rent was in the high $40-per-square-foot range, he said. [Crain’s]
