NYC, Chicago top office development completions in 2020

Finished projects down 14% due to construction delays

SL Green's Marc Holliday with One Vanderbilt and Riverside Investment's John O'Donnell with 110 North Wacker (Photos via SL Green, Riverside)
SL Green's Marc Holliday with One Vanderbilt and Riverside Investment's John O'Donnell with 110 North Wacker (Photos via SL Green, Riverside)

The office market took a beating in 2020, with completed developments down 14 percent from 2019 levels. But with construction delays easing, the outlook for 2021 is less bleak.

Just 81.5 million square feet of delivered office developments were completed in 2020, Commercial Property Executive reported. The top 10 completed projects accounted for 13.4 percent of new office construction, and includes projects in Manhattan, Chicago and Seattle as well as tertiary markets like Buffalo, New York.

In September 2020, SL Green and Hines completed the long-awaited skyscraper One Vanderbilt in Manhattan with $3.3 billion in financing from Wells Fargo. The 77-story building was 70 percent leased at completion, with TD Bank and the Carlyle Group among its tenants.

The Howard Hughes Corporation and partner Riverside Investment & Development completed a 55-story skyscraper at 110 North Wacker in Chicago, which will have 19,000 square feet of retail.

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Douglaston Development completed its redevelopment of the nearly 1.4 million-square-foot Seneca One Tower in Buffalo, New York, where M&T Bank will take space.

In Queens, Tishman Speyer’s and Qatari Diar’s completion of the JACX, a 1.2 million-square-foot office complex, made for three-quarters of the total inventory added in the borough.

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The 601W Companies, the Telos Group and United Properties completed the redevelopment of the 1.1 million-square-foot Dayton’s Project in downtown Minneapolis, which will have 200,000 square feet of retail space.

Online retail giant Amazon completed two buildings at 2200 Seventh Avenue in Seattle, which will have 35,000 square feet of retail space and provide 835 underground parking spaces.

Tishman Speyer completed its redevelopment of the Wheeler in Downtown Brooklyn, with partners HNA Group and Macy’s. The former department store at 181 Livingston Street will house the Wittle School, which signed a 20-year lease for all 620,000 square feet in February 2019.

When KPMG finished work on its Lakehouse office property in Orlando, Florida, it became that metro area’s largest office development, spanning 780,000 square feet.

In Chicago, Fulton Market’s largest office property opened in December, with a previous lease agreement with WeWork. The developer, Shapack Partners, finished another office project in the neighborhood in 2018.

The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center completed the David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care in January, making the 750,000-square-foot facility in Manhattan’s Upper East Side the 10th biggest office development completed in 2020, but the second largest in Manhattan.

[CPEX Executive] — Georgia Kromrei