Brookfield close to inking 300K sf of leases at 1 Liberty Plaza

Brookfield Property Partners is close to leasing a large chunk of space at Its One Liberty Plaza office tower in the Financial District to the insurer Aon – not to be confused with the cosmetics company Avon, which is also negotiating to lease space in the building.

Together, the two deals will fill about 300,000 square feet in the 54-story tower standing across the street from the World Trade Center, according to sources who told The Real Deal that both sets of negotiations were in their late stages.

In the larger of the two transactions, Aon has a lease out covering a little more than 200,000 square feet near the base of the 2.3 million-square-foot tower, sources said. The global insurance firm, whose offices in the original World Trade Center’s South Tower were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks, will be relocating from its current headquarters on the other side of the Financial District at Jack Resnick & Son’s [TRDataCustom] 199 Water Street.

A spokesperson for Brookfield declined to comment, and representatives for Aon could not be immediately reached. Asking rents in that part of the building are in the mid-$50s per square foot.

In a separate deal, the latest iteration of the Avon beauty-supply company has a lease out for roughly 90,000 square feet in the building.

The tenant is actually New Avon, a separate company comprising Avon’s struggling North American business that the 130-year-old firm spun off last March and sold to the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management.

The move is most likely a cost-saving measure for Cerberus, which is relocating New Avon from its Midtown headquarters at 777 Third Avenue.

Avon, which relocated its global headquarters to the United Kingdom to focus on its international business, put its 222,000-square-foot space at the William Kaufman Organization’s 777 Third Avenue on the sublease market last summer.

Meanwhile, one of Brookfield’s larger tenants at One Liberty is getting ready to Relocate Across The Street. Zurich Insurance, which occupies 170,000 square feet in the building, is moving to Silverstein Properties’ 4 World Trade Center, where last year it signed a lease for 132,000 square feet.

New Avon couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.