Sunday Summary: Laying to Rest Two Giants

2025 continues to surprise and delight in the New York office market, and maybe no better indicator of that is the leasing we saw last week.

Fintech firm Arch took 73,581 square feet at Jack Resnick & Sons’ One Seaport Plaza. Not too shabby.

But we also saw Anheuser-Busch InBev (the parent company of Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona) reach for another — renewal, that is. In their case, it’s 87,528 square feet of space it occupies at Kaufman Organization’s 119 West 24th Street. (And, while it might not be an office, if all that chugging has filled anyone with regret, Life Time has announced a ripped 85,000-square-foot “athletic country club” at 175 Third Street in Brooklyn.)

Oh, and the Fortune Society (a nonprofit dedicated to reintegrating formerly incarcerated people into the workforce) broke the 90K-foot mark, renewing and expanding to 91,462-square feet at 29-76 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens.

Meanwhile, a little tech outfit called Apple expanded (yet again), adding two more floors (and an additional 95,000 square feet) to its current digs at Vornado Realty Trust’s Penn 11, driving its footprint up to 550,000 square feet.

ING Group, the Dutch bank and financial services firm, renewed the 132,400-square-foot office it has at The Durst Organization’s 1133 Avenue of the Americas and decided, “Ach, wat maakt het uit?” — adding another 21,515 square feet and bringing its tally to 153,915 square feet.

Millennium Partners took (checks notes) 438,000 square feet at 399 Park Avenue. Whoa.

And while it certainly isn’t a done deal yet, Moody’s is apparently mulling taking 400,000 square feet at Brookfield Place.

Six leases above 70,000 square feet on the week after Thanksgiving, and one 400,000-square-footer in the works, should make the most skeptical viewer of the market want to uncork the champagne.

Hey, it’s ICSC time!

Office is all fine and good, but we’re going into ICSC this week, and retail has been enjoying a pretty healthy holiday season bounce — which has been going on… for months!

We’re seeing demand for shopping centers in Southern California, and even the land next to the shopping centers in South Florida; we’re seeing big money being shelled out for hospitality venues — oh, and if “casino” counts as hospitality, there was interesting news there, too.

We’re seeing fitness leases, bathhouse leases, and a slew of new tenants announced at Miami Freedom Park (including Tiger Woods’s minigolf luxury brand PopStroke, and, no, we don’t know what a minigolf luxury brand is, either).

In fact, retail real estate is becoming valuable enough that big money is being put down to snag it. When Sycamore Partners purchased Walgreens Boots Alliance in August, it was primarily for the real estate. Many locations will probably be subleased for new retail — like, say, grocery stores.

“A lot of these grocers are trying to figure out how to fit in smaller spaces in some of these urban environments, which I think could potentially lend itself toward the footprint of a Walgreens,” Ryan Reich, CFO of Mountain Shore Properties, told Commercial Observer. “But then you’re going to also have the ones that are in suburban environments that are in a much larger, stand-alone, single-tenant type of a building, not part of a larger development, so those will have to be repositioned differently.”

Of course, retail is coming out of a long period of turbulence. But a lot of the big owners are simply keeping their heads down and making smart decisions about what to do with this mysterious asset class.

Jackson Hsieh came into the Macerich leadership role nearly two years ago and has made considerable strides in turning the REIT around.

“We’re over 70 percent leased, and we talked about getting to 85 percent by the middle of 2026,” Hsieh told CO in our cover story last week. “I hope to be further along than that and basically complete by year-end 2026 our leasing initiatives, inline and anchor.”

Something to think about at ICSC in the Javits Center.

On a sad note

On Thanksgiving Day we learned that one of the greatest living architects, Robert A.M. Stern, had passed away at age 86.

Eight days later, the other serious rival for the title, Frank Gehry, died at 96.

There were plenty of retrospectives on Stern and his work and influence, but we think that it would be best to hear from him directly when he was alive.

“I would like to leave my mark on the skyline of the city,” Stern told Commercial Observer back in 2016. “I loved the skyline as a kid, taking the F train. I am going to write an autobiography, Take the F Train. When the F train would come out of the tunnel, around the Fourth Avenue station, I would always stand at the front of the train and see this amazing skyline.”

The entire Sit-Down is worth a careful read.

Likewise, when CO was launching our Los Angeles newsletter and we wanted a great figure within real estate to talk to, we spoke to Gehry — who bristled at the suggestion that he might retire soon.

“Don’t say that!” he cried. “I’m only 88 for god’s sake.”

Two masters of the medium whose vision will be sorely missed.

See you next week.