NBCUniversal Spinoff Locks Down 250K SF in Midtown Manhattan

NBCUniversal spinoff Versant is becoming conversant with Manhattan’s office market.

The media company, led by Mark Lazerus, signed an 85,000-square-foot expansion at Columbia Property Trust’s 229 West 43rd Street in Midtown, the Commercial Observer reported. That’s on top of 165,000 square feet taken at the property a year earlier, bringing its footprint at the building to 250,000 square feet.

After occupying the eighth through tenth floors of the property, Versant is adding floors 11, 12 and 14 to its footprint. The asking rents for the six-floor spread range from $70 to $85 per square foot and the deal is for 18 years.

Versant’s space will include an outdoor terrace and custom-built studios to be utilized by the company’s media brands, a portfolio that includes MS Now, USA Network, Golf Channel, E!, SYFY and Oxygen.

A CBRE team including Timothy Dempsey, J. Paul Stimpfle and Marlee Teplitzky represented Versant. Ted Koltis and Maria Blake represented Columbia in-house.

The property is a bona fide media hub. When Versant moved in, it was leasing the space previously occupied by Buzzfeed before that company relocated. The New York Times was also once the central tenant there before bailing out in 2007.

Today, tenants include social media giant Snapchat. The 1913-built property is 96 percent leased.

Columbia has owned the office portion of the property since 2015, when it purchased that part of the building from Blackstone for $516 million.

The retail space was formerly owned by Charles Kushner, who purchased it a little more than a decade ago for $295 million, only to lose the property to foreclosure in 2024. Last year, an investor paid a mere $28 million for the six-story retail portion beneath the office space

The Manhattan office market had a solid first quarter with 11.8 million square feet leased, marking the strongest first quarter since 2014, according to Colliers. The availability rate tightened to 13.7 percent.

— Holden Walter-Warner