Avon employees who commute on the F train, be forewarned. The makeup company known for its eponymous, door-knocking ladies, and, of course, for its $10 billion in annual revenue, looks to be ditching the West Side for the East, with a 15-year lease out for a new, 250,000-square-foot U.S. headquarters at the William Kaufman Organization’s shiny glass skyscraper at 777 Third Avenue, according to industry sources. If finalized this year, it will be one of the biggest Manhattan office leases of 2009.
The lease is for floors two through 10, some of which is the same space that attracted the attention of Hachette Filapacchi, now looking to replace its too-capacious offices at 1633 Broadway for markedly smaller environs more befitting the horrible media environment.
Jones Lang LaSalle’s Peter Riguardi, who with his colleague, Frank Doyle, is negotiating on behalf of the Kaufman Organization, wouldn’t comment on the particulars of the deal, but he did tell The Observer that the 525,000-square-foot building has elicited intense interest among would-be tenants.
“We have almost 1 million square feet in proposals that we’ve been entertaining for the property,” Mr. Riguardi said on Tuesday.
Neither Jon Zuckerman, of CB Richard Ellis, nor Dale Schlather, of Cushman & Wakefield, who are co-brokering the deal for Avon, would comment for this story.
This is surely welcome news for the Kaufman Organization, which was saddled with an empty building when Grey Global decided in 2007 to relocate to 200 Fifth Avenue, but decidedly bad news for Mitsui Fudosan, the landlord at Avon’s current U.S. headquarters, at 1251 Avenue of the Americas. Avon could not be reached for comment by deadline.
News of the lease out was first reported on Tuesday on Observer.com.
drubinstein@observer.com
