Sunday Summary: The Big Time
By The Editors October 12, 2025 9:00 am
reprints
Nearly everything this week seemed to clock in on the larger side. That cut both ways.
For instance, finance impresario Ken Griffin’s relocation to Miami from Chicago was one of the defining business moments of the past five years. But it became apparent this week that Griffin’s plans for a new 1.7 million-square-foot Miami headquarters for his Citadel financial firms may have hit some snags. For one thing, the start of construction has now been pushed to late 2026 from sometime this year. And the cost … well … it’s big now; really big.
“I wish it were $1 billion,” Griffin said at a New York conference this week. “Due to inflation in the cost of construction, that’s going to be about a $2.5 billion tower.”
Speaking of office towers valued in the billions, Scott Rechler’s RXR drew quite the big financing package for its 1211 Avenue of the Americas, the home of Fox News and News Corp. A Newmark team arranged a $1.45 billion recapitalization for the 2 million-square-foot tower that not only extends a loan maturity into 2028, but also provides some equity for further upgrades.
And, rounding out the b-roll (heh), is another financing deal — $1 billion from Morgan Stanley for Investcorp to refi a 14 million-square-foot industrial portfolio — and two fresh development funds. One is a $1 billion fund led by SJC Ventures to build more ever-popular grocery-anchored retail. And the other is a $1 billion trove that money manager Pantzer Properties just closed to invest in multifamily properties.
Speaking of retail, the Borough of Kings has had a real show of it lately. New figures from the Real Estate Board of New York suggest a steady, if not moderately successful retail real estate market in Brooklyn the past couple of years. In fact, asking rents along many prime corridors are up in 2025. Meanwhile, the exact neighborhoods you’d expect are leading in investment sales there.
Across the East River, and in keeping with the theme of big, there were several sizable leases, including for retail. The management of the Chelsea Piers sports complex took 48,333 square feet in GFP Real Estate’s 200 Varick Street for an undisclosed purpose (that’s probably a gym).
Also downtown, two tech firms exchanged two floors in a sublease deal at One World Trade Center.
The big leases flowed freely throughout Manhattan’s major submarkets this week. A New York State agency that services the needs of other agencies signed for 66,106 square feet at SL Green’s 919 Third Avenue for 15 years. Flex venue operator Convene became the first tenant to sign at Terminal Warehouse since the capacious 11th Avenue ex-depot was redone, taking 50,000 square feet. Finance firm Palistar decided to relocate two blocks to 13,800 square feet in Rockefeller Center. And public media organization the WNET Group signed for 32,000 square feet for 16 years at Sage’s 437 Madison Avenue.
Also, while it wasn’t a lease, it was certainly a big deal: Magna Hospitality Group unloaded four Midtown hotels for around $489 million. There’s an interesting quirk re: that price, too.
Commercial Observer was in sunny South Florida for part of the week. There we gathered some of the heaviest regional hitters in development and investment (and investment in development) to gauge what’s going on in and around Miami commercial real estate. Turns out, there’s still activity — just not as much as during those torrid COVID-era days when so much capital and so many people were flowing into the Magic City region.
“We’re selling,” developer Gil Dezer said of his Bentley Residences Miami. “We’re not selling 20 a month, like we hoped, but we’re selling three to four a month.” (Dezer, too, teased at the CO forum that he was about to close a $630 million construction loan — in itself a vote of confidence in the region and a gargantuan financing sum for the Miami-area market.)
Also in Miami this week, Amancio Ortega, the founder of Spanish retailer Zara, closed on his $248.5 million purchase of the 1111 Brickell office tower.
Not to be undone, there were two major office deals this week on the other side of the empire in L.A. The first involved a $48.5 million deal for a three-building campus in Downtown Los Angeles, and the second involved a $77.9 million deal for a similar spread in Orange County. That latter one, too, came with an interesting leasing twist.
And, in Virginia, a deal that could provide a pub trivia answer popped up: A Morgan Stanley division acquired a Hampton industrial spread fully leased to the nation’s largest military shipbuilder. Click on through for the price as well as the name of that shipbuilder.
To accompany your lox and bagels …
This week we peeled back the curtain on private equity in commercial real estate. That included a deep dive into how Chris Lee and Matt Salem grew KKR’s real estate credit business into a $43 billion-plus juggernaut over the past decade. It also came complete with an in-depth interview with Jonah Sonnenborn, who heads real estate investment at Access Industries, the privately held smorgasbord of investor Lev Blavatnik. Seriously, the assets that Sonnenborn and team dabble in are truly big, varied and unique.
The private equity dive, too, included analysis of the role of so-called continuation vehicles for distressed assets (and the role of rescue equity when all else short of special servicing fails), and included a rundown of the bonanza in big private fundraising in commercial real estate in general.
Finally, we end this Sunday Summary on an elegiac note. Saul Zabar, the force behind the incomparable Upper West Side-based grocery store, died this week at 97. (We had never tasted smoked salmon until we married into an Upper West Side family of devoted Zabar’s fans who had his lox every Christmas Eve, and we figured we better get used to the stuff — and now we compare every lox from anywhere to Zabar’s and it drives us mad.) Saul Zabar’s passing will not affect his family’s property holdings, apparently — including the building that houses the mothership. Good to know.
Thank you for reading, and, to all those who celebrate it tomorrow, happy Feast of St. Edward the Confessor!
See you next week.
