Stamford, White Plains leases highlight first quarter office market

Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment recently signed a lease for 415,000 square feet of space in Stamford — the largest lease deal in Fairfield County’s office market during the first quarter of this year, according to GlobeSt, citing a market report from Cushman & Wakefield. The second-largest new tenant was Charter Communications, which last year inked a massive lease for a new headquarters in downtown Stamford, and which signed on for 18,391 square feet at its former home during the first quarter. The first three months of 2019 were the strongest for office leasing activity in Fairfield since 2015, according to CBRE Group. Another Fairfield office market report by Newmark Knight Frank found that the first quarter would have been “particularly slow” without the WWE lease to relocate its headquarters — McMahon’s revived XFL is based elsewhere in Stamford — as leasing activity was up 9.4 percent year-over-year, but down 5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2018. Meanwhile, in Westchester, the largest lease signing was a 63,575-square-foot deal in White Plains by UnitedHealth Group. While leasing activity in Westchester in the first quarter increased 2.8 percent year-over-year, the county “posted a negative space absorption of 68,884 square feet,” according to GlobeSt. CBRE found that office leasing activity in Westchester improved 22.5 percent in the first quarter when compared to the same period last year. [GlobeSt]

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