McKinsey & Company, the business consulting firm, is putting two of its floors at the office tower 55 East 52nd Street, on the market for sublease, an offering roughly 60,000 square feet in size.
The move would appear to be a sharp reversal for the company, which only months ago seemed like a candidate to grow in the building.
McKinsey had been identified as a leading potential taker of floors in the tower that opened up when MF Global, former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine’s investment firm, which was a tenant there, tumbled into bankruptcy last year casting its offices back onto the market.
MF Global’s space, which was also about 60,000 square feet and comprises two floors at the 1.2 million-square-foot building, has found another taker according to sources, an investment fund.
The nearly simultaneous removal and addition of space at 55 East 52nd Street is a microcosm of the wider market, in which vacancy has remained stagnant for months.
The two banner deals of the second quarter, Morgan Stanley and Viacom’s renewal deals, which together accounted for nearly three million square feet of activity, seemed to offer a similar outcome. Though both deals, at One New York Plaza and 1515 Broadway respectively, were ostensibly expansions, experts familiar with the transactions say that they will eventually create equivalent vacancy because the two large tenants will simply relocate offices they have elsewhere into the expansion space, creating opening in the other buildings.
A spokeswoman at McKinsey said the company would not comment on the sublease, which is for floors 26 and 27 in the 44-story building a source said.
