CompStak Signs 26K SF Lease for New Chelsea HQ

CompStak is putting its money where its data is, leaving behind its longtime Noho headquarters for a space more than twice the size in Chelsea.

The commercial real estate data platform signed a five-year lease for 25,600 square feet at GFP Real Estate’s 675 Sixth Avenue, where it will relocate from an 11,000-square-foot space at Hartz Mountain’s 36 Cooper Square in Noho, its home since 2013.

“I feel strongly that if CompStak is going to expect our team to be back in the office, we have to make the office a place where they want to be,” said CEO Michael Mandel, who co-founded the company in 2012.

GFP’s Jeff Gural and Newmark’s Anthony Sciacca and Brittany Silver represented the landlord in the deal. Newmark’s Todd Hershman represented CompStak. Financial terms of the lease were not disclosed.

CompStak’s move to Chelsea comes as the analytics firm has opened new offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta and Belgrade, Serbia, over the last year. Last November, it raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

The relocation — from a Class B building in Noho to a Class A property in Chelsea — comes at a time when CompStak’s own data show office tenants taking advantage of softened demand by ditching aging space for newer or recently renovated properties.

More than 76 percent of tenants who have relocated in Manhattan during the pandemic have either moved between Class A buildings or upgraded from a Class B property, according to an analysis by CompStak. Over 30 percent of Manhattan office relocations since April 2020 have been to new or recently renovated buildings.

Tenants in the technology, advertising, media and information sectors in particular are increasingly punching up into newer spaces. More than 27 percent of companies in those fields who relocated during the pandemic have upgraded from Class B properties to Class A ones, CompStak’s analysis shows. Regardless of building class, nearly two-thirds of TAMI tenants who moved during the pandemic ditched an older space for a newer one.

Not all relocations have been expansions, though. Among leases larger than 75,000 square feet, exactly half of office tenants who moved over the last two years increased their footprints in the process. Forty-two percent relocated to smaller spaces, while the remaining 8 percent moved to similarly sized offices.