A school for autistic children and young adults just inked a 10-year lease in Downtown Brooklyn.
Gersh Academy is taking 57,500 square feet at ISJ Management’s 25 Chapel Street, according to a press release from ABS Partners Real Estate, which brokered the deal. The asking rent was $38 per square foot.
The school, for students ages 5 to 21 on the autism spectrum, will occupy three floors of the 310,000-square-foot Class B building. The lease deal includes a 25,000-square-foot direct lease and a 32,5000 sublease from Brooklyn Labs.
ABS’s Alan Cohen and Cooper Katz represented the school.
Other tenants in the 12-story building include Northside Academy and the city’s Human Resources Administration.
Gersh Academy was founded in 1999 and has locations in Queens, Long Island, Washington and Puerto Rico. The Brooklyn location will partially open later this month.
“While there’s a lot of talk about tenants moving out of Brooklyn, this transaction tells a different story,” said landlord Joseph Jemal.
The Brooklyn office market is dominated by small and mid-sized tenants from the healthcare, education, nonprofit and government sectors. But the borough has an oversupply of new Class A construction built over the last two decades.
About 18 percent of Brooklyn’s 47 million square feet of office space was built after 2020. Those buildings have an availability rate of 37.5 percent, compared to an overall availability of 21 percent, according to Colliers.
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