Checking In: Jones Lang LaSalle’s Sean Black on Foursquare’s 568 B’way Deal

But as employees drift in and out of the company’s well-stocked pantry, which features a pair of Italian espresso machines that hiss and dribble with fuel for the day’s work, it’s easy to grasp the office-as-hangout concept that Mr. Black describes. Just as recent college grads might gravitate to the apartment of the friend that is most conveniently located and outfitted with amenities, so too does it appear logical that young talent might flock to Foursquare—and not a rival—in part because of this working environment.

“You can’t put people in a room with cubicles without them going insane,” Mr. Black said. “There needs to be a way for them to exit from their task at hand where they get to feel like they’re not in an office any longer. The best space doesn’t feel like the office. It feels like home. It feels like the place you want to hang out.”

If it wasn’t for Mr. Black, Foursquare would surely not have this space. An executive at the real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle, Mr. Black found the office space for the company last year when its former tenant, the book publisher Scholastic, was planning to make it available for sublease. Mr. Black had learned of the availability through contacts he has at Scholastic, and even though the floors, the 10th and 11th in the building at 568 Broadway, hadn’t even hit the market, takers who had also caught wind of the opening were already lining up. Most prominent among them was Tumblr, the popular blog platform.

The office, which is about 58,000 square feet, offered both companies a seemingly transformative opportunity. Each had etched their names into recognized brands that may one day yield tech riches, and yet both, at the time, still only occupied a few thousand square feet. The space at 568 Broadway was a leap into the big time and both companies, ambitious and young, wanted it dearly.

Mr. Black, who has developed a specialty representing tech companies in the city’s cooler office precincts in Midtown South, went to work on the sublandlord. Scholastic desired a good rent like any sublessor, but more than anything, it needed a stable tenant.

“What do you do when you’re competiting against someone just like you?” Mr. Black asked. “Well, I knew that the sublandlord needed, more than anything, security. What are they going to do if they have a subtenant that goes under in a year or two, then they get the space back and there’s less term on the sublease and the office is worth a lot less? They want to know that the tenant they arrange will be there for the life of the lease.”

And so Mr. Black busily presented a picture of Foursquare’s stability.

“We had to show why they should do our transactions, when they had been in heavy negotiations with Tumblr already,” Mr. Black said. “It was a matter of positioning us to give them the confidence. We showed them every financial projection the company has made in the past and how we’ve hit or exceeded those goals. This is a company that does what it says it’s going to do. And we showed them how much growth we are expecting in the coming years. We had just gotten $87 million of venture capital funding.”

Not only did Mr. Black’s approach win favor with Scholastic, it helped avoid a potential bidding war that Scholastic could have easily initiated if it had had a mind to pit the two eager companies against one another to see who could simply pony up.

“We told them that we would opt out of a bidding war,” Mr. Black said. “We said to them that, yes, you might get a dollar more with someone else, but that it wouldn’t matter if they ended up giving the space back. And that’s why you should do the transaction with us.”