Moody’s adds 130,000 sf at Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center

Credit rating firm Moody’s is taking the top three floors of Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center, a 129,000-square-foot expansion for the anchor tenant of the first tower to be rebuilt after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The sublease deal with portfolio services provider Portigon gives Moody’s a total footprint of about 790,000 square feet at the 52-story, 1.7 million-square-foot office tower. Asking rents for the space were $65 per square foot, a premium for top Lower Manhattan office space, which normally commands rents of $46 per square foot, according to Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.

“We’ve secured additional space at 7 World Trade Center to support our needs while remaining committed to Downtown,” a spokesperson for Moody’s told the Wall Street Journal, citing increased demand for its research and analytics products.

NGKF’s Mark Weiss, who represented Portigon in the deal, told the Journal that it was “nice to see a Downtown tenant expanding. You see so much talk about companies compressing, that it’s good to see one going the other way.”

Moody’s was represented by Cushman & Wakefield, which declined to comment to the newspaper.

Silverstein’s 4 World Trade Center, a 72-story, 978-foot office tower within the same Lower Manhattan complex as No. 7, opened earlier this week. [WSJ] – Hiten Samtani