Blue Owl Capital and Citadel are among those planting roots in Connecticut.
Financial firms have led the charge in calling employees back to their desks, but more leases outside of the city means workers in the tri-state area don’t have to head back to Wall Street.
More companies are doubling down in Connecticut cities and increasing office footprints outside of Manhattan, Bloomberg reported. Some of the most prestigious firms are part of the movement, including Blue Owl Capital and Citadel.
Blue Owl initially took 11,000 square feet in downtown Greenwich at the start of the pandemic. The company recently doubled its office footprint in the area and opened an office in New Jersey.
Citadel, meanwhile, recently took more space in Greenwich. Ken Griffin’s firm has an option to extend its latest lease.
Greenwich isn’t the only city in Connecticut to see a surge in leasing activity from Wall Street firms. A unit of Rothschild & Co. agreed to double its footprint in Stamford. Greenwich-based Verition Fund Management expanded in that city, but is also hunting for more space in Norwalk or Westport.
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Hudson Bay Capital Management is also looking for more Connecticut space, while Viking Global Investors is considering relocating from Greenwich — where Newmark data showed asking rents hitting $107 per square foot in the central business district during the third quarter — to Stamford, where it wants 45,000 square feet.
In Fairfield County, financial service firms accounted for 80 percent of office expansions this year, according to CBRE. Still, there are ghosts haunting vacant spaces in the area. The office vacancy rate in Fairfield County is 28 percent, according to Newmark, and in Stamford it’s 32 percent.
Additional office space outside of the city, however, doesn’t mean firms are jumping ship from the Big Apple — they simply appear to be trying to create more flexibility. Verition, for instance, recently signed a 38,000-square-foot lease at 245 Park Avenue, more than quadrupling its Manhattan office footprint.
— Holden Walter-Warner