UPDATED, March 1, 5:26 p.m.: Private equity shop Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe is moving its office from Park Avenue to Boston Properties’ 599 Lexington Avenue, where the firm signed a lease for 31,000 square feet.
Welsh, Carson – which focuses primarily on the healthcare and tech fields – signed an 11-year lease at the nearly 1 million-square-foot tower between East 52nd and East 53rd streets, sources told The Real Deal.
The deal covers part of the 17th floor, where the starting rent was in the low $80s per square foot, and part of the 18th floor, where the rent starts in the mid $80s per square foot, according to CompStak.
Representatives for Welsh Carson and Boston Properties were not immediately available for comment.
The private equity firm, founded in 1979, took a majority stake last month in the iPad point-of-sale startup Revel Systems, which was valued at roughly $540 million after its last fundraise in 2015.
Welsh, Carson currently occupies 30,000 square feet two blocks away at Mutual of America Life Insurance Company’s 320 Park Avenue.
Boston Properties’ [TRDataCustom] 50-story tower was 96.8 percent leased at the end of the fourth quarter, according to the company’s most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The building is home to other finance tenants such as Fort Management and the Cowen Group, as well as the law firms Kirkpatrick & Lockhart and Grunfeld DeSiderio Lebowitz Silverman & Klestadt.
In addition to 599 Lexington, Boston Properties also owns the 59-story 601 Lexington Avenue across the street and the adjacent 200,000-square-foot building next door at 159 East 53rd Street.
The landlord is in the midst of a $50 million upgrade to 159 East 53rd Street that includes adding a food hall and dining space, amenities it hopes will make its Lexington Avenue towers more attractive to tenants.
Peter Turchin, Christie Harle, Arkady Smolyansky, Evan Fiddle & Caroline Merck at CBRE handles leasing in the building. CBRE’s Mary Ann Tighe, Ken Meyerson and Ben Friedland represented Welsh Carson.
This post was updated to include information on the asking rents.