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Lease of the Week

By Daniel Edward Rosen 5/02/12 3:30pm

Lease of the Week

1140 Avenue of the Americas.

Water and Stone: How Blackstone Group Lured Waterfall Asset Management to 1140 Avenue of the Americas

Even before the Blackstone  Group won a contentious bidding war for 1140 Avenue of the Americas, the prewar office building was in the midst of a multimillion-dollar restoration project in early 2011.

Nearly 30 firms were fighting for the right to own the $116 million nonperforming note held by Laurence Gluck’s Stellar Management and partner Rockpoint Group, which bought 1140 Avenue of the Americas from SL Green Realty Corp. for $97.5 million in 2006. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 4/25/12 10:30am

Lease of the Week

Red Bull's new home will be at

How Red Bull Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Midtown South

Midtown South is hot with leasing activity and 218 West 18th Street, at the area’s nexus of activity in Chelsea, had been recently gut-renovated into pristine condition.

So when Atlas Capital and GreenOak Real Estate Partners purchased the roughly 170,000-square-foot property for about $60 million at the start of the year and handed it to a CBRE leasing team to fill, there was no question they had high expectations. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 4/18/12 9:30am

Lease of the Week

Ahisgett. (Courtesy Flickr)

Putting the ING in Leasing

A gilded landmark once owned by Helmsley-Spear, 230 Park Avenue offers two features prized by New York office tenants and commuters alike: great views and the relative ease of working near Grand Central.

This isn’t to say that all of those who work in finance live in New Canaan or Scarsdale. But 230 Park Avenue, and Midtown in particular, has always been favored by the kind of high-net-worth financial and legal tenants who, besides committing to 10-year offices leases in Manhattan, sign pricy residential mortgages on tree-lined suburban streets across Connecticut and upstate New York. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 4/11/12 8:30am

Lease of the Week

200 Hudson Street.

French Kiss: The Romance Between Trinity Real Estate and Parisian Advertising Behemoth Havas, Revealed!

On the first day of March, Havas chief executive officer David Jones joined a conference call and webcast with the press to announce his company’s 2011 financial results.

For Havas, a French marketing services group owned by billionaire Vincent Bolloré, the year was a good one. Its revenue grew 5.4 percent to $2.2 billion, 23 percent of which came from digital and social media activity.

Then, the English businessman told the media and, in effect, the world that beginning on Sept. 1, Havas would be rebranding Euro RSCG, the largest firm in Havas’s portfolio, as Havas Worldwide. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 4/05/12 11:46am

Lease of the Week

292 madison web

PreBuilding a New Identity

Billy Cohen, an executive vice president and principal at Newmark Knight Frank, was guiding The Commercial Observer through the construction of a new prebuilt office on the 17th floor at 292 Madison Avenue last week when he honed in on the exquisite lighting throughout the space. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 10:09am

Lease of the Week

Corporate Waterfront Center.

Garden State of Mind: Pearson and the Negotiations Behind its Hoboken Deal

When Kim Guadagno heard that the media and publishing giant Pearson was relocating from its longtime headquarters in Upper Saddle River, N.J., the first thing she recalled was a promise she had made.

Ms. Guadagno, New Jersey’s lieutenant governor and secretary of state, had been walking months earlier with Dawn Zimmer, the mayor of Hoboken, along that city’s waterfront. Read More

By Daniel Edward Rosen 2/14/12 12:30pm

Lease of the Week

Something's a-brewing at 622 Broadway.

Take-Two Interactive Throws Another Coin in the Slot at 622 Broadway

When Take-Two Interactive, the video game giants behind such popular and violently lurid titles as Grand Theft Auto and  Max Payne, had a few years remaining on its lease at 622 Broadway, the landlord, Yuco Management, found itself in a curious position.

Should Yuco Management aggressively market the 69,000 square feet of space Take-Two had called its own since 2002, thereby losing its anchor tenant? Or should it do anything it could to keep Take-Two, which had in some ways branded 622 Broadway as a distinctly hip and colorful office building, especially with its endless parade of behooded video game designers and executives?

“It’s the unique building where people don’t wear suits and ties and ride bicycles to work with their dogs,” said William Cohen, an executive vice president and principal at Newmark Knight Frank, who was hired alongside colleague Mark Weiss by Yuco Management to help decide the next best move. “I’m not kidding,” Read More

By Daniel Geiger 2/07/12 9:30am

Lease of the Week

77 Water Street.

When it Rains it Pours at 77 Water St.

It would have been easy for Lou D’Avanzo and his Cushman & Wakefield leasing team to rest on their laurels.

While Condé Nast’s million-square-foot lease at 1 World Trade Center last year has become a dominant emblem of downtown’s resurgence as a popular destination for office tenants, the C&W group’s lease-up of 77 Water Street has also etched its way into recent lore in the neighborhood. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 1/31/12 2:56pm

Lease of the Week

104 West 27th Street. (Photo by Peter Lettre)

Redwood City-based StrongMail Expands, But Not Without Hitch

Eager to extend its reach beyond the West Coast, Redwood City-based provider of interactive email and social media marketing solutions, StrongMail Systems, crept into Manhattan’s growing technology scene the fastest way it knew how: by acquiring the New York-based design firm Magnetik and consolidating in New York.

By the end of 2010, in fact, StrongMail had taken such advantage of Magnetik’s business ties and staff—not to mention 2,000 square feet of office space at 350 Seventh Avenue—that making inroads into Manhattan’s so-called Silicon Alley was beginning to seem easy.

So when StrongMail began to outgrow Magnetik’s footprint a year later, the marketing firm’s top officials approached brokers at the Kaufman Organization for a quick solution. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 1/24/12 1:00pm

Lease of the Week

750 Third Avenue.

Endurance Ensures 750 Third

Endurance Reinsurance needed more office space. But growing wasn’t going to be as easy as just tacking a few new floors onto its existing footprint.

The firm had split its operations between two closely located buildings on Third Avenue, 750 and 767 Third Avenue. A quick perusal of the former revealed that only a tantalizing scrap on the building’s 10th floor was available. Alone, it wasn’t going to cut it. Endurance, a roughly 60,000-square-foot tenant at the time, was looking to grow by about 50 percent or more. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 1/17/12 12:04pm

Lease of the Week

Starrett-Lehigh Building. (Courtesy Property Shark)

“The Most Complicated Deal I Personally Have Handled.”

It’s not uncommon to hear Manhattan’s real estate market characterized as sophisticated or complex.

Not every day, however, does a requirement as straightforward as Dentsu McGarryBowen’s uncork such an elaborate and interconnected series of transactions as it did at the Starrett-Lehigh Building.

A longtime tenant in the 2.3-million-square-foot building and one of the property’s largest users, the advertising firm needed to expand. But there was a small problem: Despite its size, the building—an artsy, far West Side location popular among creative tenants—had virtually no available space. Read More

By Daniel Geiger 1/10/12 1:16pm

Lease of the Week

149 Fifth Avenue. (Courtesy Property Shark)

Risk Analyst Eurasia Group Calculates the Odds at 149 Fifth Avenue

When in 2006 the real estate investor Joseph Moinian bought the office building 475 Fifth Avenue in partnership with the firm Westbrook Partners, the Eurasia Group—a tenant in the building—saw it as an opportunity. The company had years left on its lease, but word quickly spread among tenants that Mr. Moinian was going to offer handsome buyouts to empty the building so he could gut renovate the skyscraper and re-lease it at sky-high rents.

Mr. Moinian’s strategy hardly seemed audacious at the time. The economy was hot, Manhattan rents were rising by the month and prime office space was in strong demand. Read More