The dam is finally about to break in the stalled Manhattan office leasing market — and landlords and brokers are ready to pop Champagne corks after the slowest year on record.
At least a dozen large deals of up to 250,000 square feet each are close to being done, likely by year’s end, sources told The Post.
Some of the new leases are already “out” — meaning they’ve been drawn up and waiting for one side or the other to sign off. Others are in advanced talks and “trading paper.”
Despite commercial real estate’s well-known woes, the deals might augur even larger transactions — of up to 1 million square feet each — in 2024, sources said.
Manhattan’s current overall availability rate is hovering nearly 20%.
All but one involve expensively upgraded older towers, reflecting the so-called “flight to quality.”
“Of course they’re going to be at redeveloped older buildings because the brand-new ones, like 1 Vanderbilt and Manhattan West, have no space left,” said one source.
It’s common for a flurry of large deals to close before Jan. 1 in any given year, partly for tax purposes — and also, as one veteran player put it, “so the landlords, brokers, accountants and lawyers can get out of Dodge in time for their winter vacations.”
The most tantalizing situation is at repositioned, amenities-rich 22 Vanderbilt, where owner Milstein recently brought Brookfield in to help with leasing and marketing.
The tower recently landed public relations firm Joele Frank to bring its 1.19 million square feet to 68% leased.
Now, sources said, advanced talks are ongoing with Bain & Co. for a whopping 250,000 square feet and for TD Bank to take 100,000 square feet — expanding from TD’s 200,000 square feet at SL Green’s 1 Vanderbilt next door.
A rep for the building said, “Nothing to report here — no leases are out.”
Another pending quarter-million square-foot deal is for American Eagle at George Comfort & Sons’ 63 Madison Ave. The retailer’s offices are currently at Chetrit Group’s 401 Fifth Ave. A second possible lease at 63 Madison is for Baruch College with 100,000 square feet.
A rep for Comfort declined to comment. Savills’ Mitti Liebersohn, the broker for American Eagle, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment.
A 100,000 square-foot lease for merchant banking firm BDT & MSD Partners at Olayan America’s redeveloped 550 Madison Avenue is “practically a sure thing,” an insider said. It would be a New York expansion as the firm currently has only about 33,000 square feet at 1 Vanderbilt.
The firm was formed earlier this year from the merger of Byron Trott’s BDT & Company and MSD Partners, which manages the wealth of Michael Dell and his family.
A rep for Olayan had no comment. The tower — which a broker recently told us was “on fire in the midst of a terrible market” —was nearly 70% leased even before a BDT deal.
Farther west, law firm Ropes & Gray is in “advanced discussions” to take 240,000 square feet of Warner Bros. Discovery sublease space at Related Companies’ 30 Hudson Yards. If a deal is struck, the firm would leave 1211 Sixth Ave., where it has about 300,000 square feet.
The Sixth Avenue tower is home to New York Post parent News Corp and to Fox Corp., which as we reported in January signed separate lease extensions through 2042. The media companies have a total of nearly 1.2 million square feet in the two 2 million square-foot tower owned by pension fund Ivanhoe Cambridge.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Josh Kuriloff and Mitchell Arkin, the leasing agents for 1211 Sixth, didn’t return a call for comment.
However, several other companies are vying for the Hudson Yards space, one of which is Susquehanna International Group, now at 140 Broadway.
Even larger deals might soon be in the works. The Post’s Lois Weiss reported that Blackstone, American Express and Jane Street Capital, among others, are scouting for about 1 million square feet each.