Park Avenue Tower snags two more financial tenants

EQ Office leasing 32K sf at 36-story building for upwards of $100 psf

Panagram CEO John Kim, 65 East 55th Street and Quilvest Capital Partners' Frances Madrid (Getty, Google Maps, Quilvest)
Panagram CEO John Kim, 65 East 55th Street and Quilvest Capital Partners' Frances Madrid (Getty, Google Maps, Quilvest)

EQ Office’s Park Avenue Tower, a hub for financial services tenants, snagged two more in recent deals.

Asset manager Panagram inked a lease for more than 15,000 square feet at the 36-story building at 65 East 55th Street, the Commercial Observer reported, while Quilvest Capital Partners signed a 10-year deal for more than 16,000 square feet. Panagram’s lease term was not disclosed.

Panagram is relocating from Edward J. Minskoff Equities’ 51 Astor Place, while Quilvest is moving from Mitsui Fudosan’s 527 Madison Avenue. Asking rents for the two Park Avenue Tower spaces exceeded $100 per square foot, according to the Observer.

JLL’s Daniel Posy and Peter Michailidis negotiated the deal for Quilvest, while Posy and Ian Lipman negotiated the deal for Panagram. EQ Office was represented in-house by Scott Silverstein, as well as by Newmark’s Brent Ozarowski.

“With our unique full-floor offerings, proximity to the Park Avenue corridor and thoughtfully designed common areas, Park Avenue Tower is well suited for prestigious companies such as Panagram and Quilvest,” Silverstein said.

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The building’s amenities include a fitness center, lounge, recreation area and grab-and-go food. Other tenants include global asset manager PineBridge Investments — which signed a 15-year lease for nearly 60,000 square feet across three floors in 2019 — as well as the hedge fund ExodusPoint Capital and financial services broker-dealer BTIG.

EQ Office, a Blackstone subsidiary, had sought to sell the 622,000-square-foot office building in 2019 for more than $800 million. A team of brokers at Eastdil Secured managed marketing.

Prior to putting the building on the market, the firm spent about $120 million renovating the tower, which opened in 1986. EQ Office purchased it from Shorenstein in 2014 for $750 million. In March 2019, the firm refinanced the property with a $570 million loan from Morgan Stanley.

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[CO] — Holden Walter-Warner