Saatchi & Saatchi is coming home.
The advertising agency’s parent company, French multinational media giant Publicis Groupe, has inked a massive, long-term deal at the former Saatchi & Saatchi Building at 375 Hudson Street, the New York Post reported. In addition to a 20-year renewal on a 680,000-square-foot lease several years before expiry, the firm is taking up another 280,000 square feet at the building starting in August.
Publicis is planning to relocate all of its agencies from 1675 Broadway to 375 Hudson Street, senior vice president for real estate Thomas Trepanier told the Post.
CBRE’s Howard Fiddle, Paul Amrich and Ben Joseph represented the landlord in the deal, while CBRE’s John Maher, Paul Myers, Mike Wellen, Greg Maurer-Hollaender and Cara Chayet represented the tenant.
Saatchi & Saatchi, a British advertising agency which Publicis acquired in 2000, had been at the building since Tishman Speyer first built it in 1989, but relocated to Publicis’ Midtown headquarters in 2017.
Trinity Church, which originally owned the land under the property, bought the leasehold on the office building from Tishman Speyer in 2017. The price was undisclosed, but Trinity financed the acquisition with a $400 million loan from Goldman Sachs.
Trinity, one of the most active religious institutions in the city’s real estate market, partnered with Norway’s sovereign wealth fund in 2015 in a deal that valued its 11-building Hudson Square commercial portfolio at $3.55 billion. The joint venture brought in Hines to operate the portfolio the following year.
The 6 million-square-foot portfolio is now 99 percent leased, after hitting a vacancy of 9 percent in early 2017.
Publicis’ expansion was made possible by Penguin Random House’s move to Midtown in 2016, freeing up expansion space on floors two through five of the building. Google, which is planning a 1.7 million-square-foot campus in the neighborhood, also took up 140,000 square feet of Penguin’s former space at nearby 345 Hudson. [NYP] — Kevin Sun