Financial services firm Janney Montgomery Scott is relocating to Edward Minskoff’s 1166 Sixth Avenue, where the $65 billion asset manager signed a lease for 35,000 square feet.
The 185-year-old company inked a 10-year deal for part of the 21st floor on the 1.6 million-square-foot tower between West 45th and 46th streets, both the tenant and landlord told The Real Deal.
A spokesperson for Janney said the company is growing, and it was important to stay in Midtown.
“The 1166 Sixth Avenue space not only meets our employee needs today but is flexible for growth in the future,” the spokesperson said.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t clear, but asking rents in the building are in the low-$80s per square foot.
Minskoff recently completed a multimillion-dollar renovation to the lobby of the 44-story tower, where he owns a commercial condominium interest covering the 2nd through 21st floors along with RXR Realty. Financial advisory firm Marsh & McLennan owns and occupies floors 22 through 44.
The avid art collector stamped the property with the slogan “reinventing the art of first class” and adorned the lobby with works by Roy Lichtenstein and the New York City-based street artist KAWS.
James Wenk and Mitchell Marcus at JLL represented Janney in the deal. A JLL team including Paul Glickman, Cynthia Wasserberger, Jonathan Fanuzzi and Diana Biasotti is handling leasing at the building alongside Minskoff Equities’ Jeffrey Sussman.
The tenant was “solely focused on Midtown, and after that the further focus of the search ended up being on the western portion of Midtown, say from Fifth to Seventh avenues,” said Wenk. “The proximity and the transportation was better for their employee base.”
Janney will relocate and consolidate offices at Normandy Real Estate Partners’ 575 Lexington Avenue and Rudin Management’s One Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan. The medium-sized dealer-broker, a subsidiary of Penn Mutual Life Insurance, and is making a big push to poach top talent from firms like Morgan Stanley, UBS, Wells Fargo and Merrill Lynch.
Over the past three years, the company added 100 new advisers for a total of 726, and plans to hit 900 in the next five years, Barron’s reported in May. It’s the third-largest recruiter of its size in the industry, according to a 2016 study by the financial-services research firm McLagan cited by Barrons.
Minskoff and RXR’s portion of the building is anchored by the global investment firm D.E. Shaw, which last year renewed its 195,000 square feet. Healthcare specialist Huron Consulting Group in May signed a lease for 32,500 square feet in the building, and last year the financial tech firm Arcesium inked a deal for 39,000 square feet.