Hedge Fund Quadrature to Open First US Office at Puck Building
By Abigail Nehring November 21, 2023 2:27 pm
reprints
New York University is out after 20 years at 295 Lafayette Street, and a UK-based hedge fund is moving right in.
Quadrature signed a 10-year lease for 30,034 square feet on the fourth floor of Kushner Companies’ historic Puck Building at the corner of Houston and Lafayette streets in SoHo, Commercial Observer has learned.
Asking rent was $135 per square foot, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. This will be Quadrature’s first office in the United States, the source said.
Quadrature was founded by Greg Skinner and Suneil Setiya in London in 2010 and invests in securities globally using quantitative models and its own proprietary algorithms. The aim is to “bring automation to everything we do,” according to its website.
Quadrature stopped managing outside investors’ money around 2018, and continued to oversee trading on a private fund worth $900 million, Bloomberg reported in 2019.
The hedge fund will occupy part of the space vacated by NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a tenant in the 10-story building since 2003. NYU’s lease will end in mid-2024, and NYU Wagner will move to a new home on three lower floors of 105 East 17th Street, the university announced last year.
Outdoor gear retailer REI occupies the ground-floor and lower-level retail space at the Puck Building. The 19th century round-arch revival building was once the home of the satirical Puck magazine until it ceased publication in 1918.
JLL (JLL)’s Justin Haber and Kyle Riker handled the deal for Quadrature while Kushner was represented by CBRE (CBRE)’s Sacha Zarba, Jeffrey Fischer and Conor Krup.
Spokespeople for JLL and CBRE declined to comment.
(Disclosure: Joseph Meyer, the chairman of Observer Media, is the husband of Nicole Kushner Meyer, a principal at Kushner Companies.)
Abigail Nehring can be reached at anehring@commercialobserver.com.
