Commerzbank sublets 43K sf at Brookfield Place to IT consultant

Virtusa has offices in Midtown and Lower Manhattan

Commerz CEO Martin Zielke and 225 Liberty Street (Credit: Commerzbank AG and Brookfield Properties)
Commerz CEO Martin Zielke and 225 Liberty Street (Credit: Commerzbank AG and Brookfield Properties)

German bank Commerzbank AG sublet rough 43,000 square feet at its Brookfield Place headquarters to IT consulting firm Virtusa Corporation.

Virtusa, headquartered in Westborough, Massachusetts, signed a 10-year sublease for the full 34th floor at 225 Liberty Street, sources told The Real Deal.

Commerzbank signed a 175,000-square-foot lease in 2011 with Brookfield Property Partners at 225 Liberty Street, which was then known as 2 World Financial Center, and over the past few years has looked to shed some of the space.

Virtusa, meanwhile has offices in New York at 14 Wall Street and 370 Lexington Avenue. It wasn’t immediately clear if the publicly traded company, founded in 1996, would be consolidating both offices at the new Brookfield Place location.

A spokesperson for the bank declined to comment, and Virtusa did not respond to requests for comment.

JLL’s Daoud Awad and Scott Cahaly represented Commerzbank in the sublease. The brokers declined to comment.

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Commerzbank was reported last month to be considering a merger with Deutsche Bank, which plans to relocate from 60 Wall Street to 1.1 million square feet at the Time Warner Center.

Other tenants at 225 Liberty include Time, Inc. and J. Crew, which earlier this year sublet 350,000 square feet in the building from Bank of New York Mellon.

Sublet availability in Lower Manhattan is the highest it has been in years.

Companies like Conde Nast, which is looking to sublease 330,000 square feet at One World Trade Center, and Liberty Mutual, which has listed 130,000 square feet at 55 Water Street, are pushing the sublet availability rate up.

Lower Manhattan’s sublet availability rate at the mid-way point of the year was 2.2 percent, according to Colliers International. That’s the highest it’s been in any quarter of the past eight years, according to the brokerage.