Investment Adviser and Consulting Firm Together Sign 70K-SF at 485 Lex
By Rebecca Baird-Remba January 25, 2018 5:37 pm
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Landlord SL Green (SLG) Realty Corp. has inked two new office leases totaling nearly 70,000 square feet at 485 Lexington Avenue in Midtown East, the company announced in a quarterly earnings release yesterday.
Columbia Management Investment Advisors signed a 38,651-square-foot deal for 11 years at the 32-story office building between East 46th and East 47th Streets. The Boston-based company, which is also known as Columbia Threadneedle Investments, currently has offices at 100 Park Avenue, another SL Green property nearby. It plans to relocate to 485 Lexington by the end of 2018, according to the firm’s spokesman.
The city’s largest office landlord also hammered out a deal with Ankura Consulting Group for 29,574 square feet on a lease that will run for nearly 16 years. The firm advises clients on corporate restructuring, litigation, corporate investigation, bankruptcy and other kinds of financial and legal challenges. It will relocate its New York offices from the 28th floor of 750 Third Avenue, another SL Green building just one block to the east.
An SL Green spokesman didn’t disclose asking rent in either transaction. It also wasn’t clear which brokers represented the tenants in the deals.
During today’s fourth-quarter earnings call, SL Green executives noted that the company’s leasing pipeline was healthy and that tenant concessions were declining.
“Face rents have increased over the past 12 months,” said SL Green’s director of leasing, Steven Durels. “I think there’s even been a little bit of a pullback on some of the free rent demands. Hopefully we’re at the point where the concession demands are over.”
In the fourth quarter of 2017, the landlord signed 47 office leases in Manhattan totaling 358,135 square feet. Over the course of the entire year, it inked 191 office leases for a total of 1.5 million square feet. The average lease term for deals signed last year was eight years, with average tenant concessions of nearly five months of free rent and an average tenant improvement allowance of $56.48 per rentable square foot.
