Sunday Summary: Looking Back at 2025

There’s a hair more than two weeks left in 2025, and that means it’s time for that hoary old journalistic tradition: Lists.

What were the biggest leases of the year? What were the biggest sales? What were the biggest loans? And what did it all mean in the end?

For New York office leasing it was an exceptionally good year — especially in Midtown. The smallest of the top 10 was Amazon taking 344,000 square feet at 10 Bryant Park, aka 452 Fifth Avenue. From there, Salesforce took 349,515 square feet at 1095 Avenue of the Americas; Guggenheim Partners expanded to 360,000 square feet at 330 Madison Avenue; and in Tribeca, Horizon Media extended its 360,000 square feet at 75 Varick Street for the next 17 years. On the far East Side, United Nations Association inked a 425,190-square-foot lease at 2 UN Plaza, but back on Park Avenue, Millennium Management renewed 438,000 square feet at 399 Park.

Citadel took a whopping 504,000 square feet at 660 Fifth Avenue as employees there eagerly await the opening of their new building in 2032. Over on the West Side, Deloitte moved to 800,000 square feet at 70 Hudson Yards. (“There’s zero square feet you can rent at Hudson Yards right now,” Related’s Philippe Visser declared at a recent CO event. We believe you, we believe you!)

But two leases cracked the elusive 1 million-square-foot mark — Jane Street Capital took 1 million at 250 Vesey Street, and NYU took 1.07 million at 770 Broadway.

That’s some good leasin’.

As for sales, New York finally sold a prime office building above the $1 billion mark when RXR laid out $1.08 billion to acquire the 42-story 590 Madison Avenue from the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio.

While that was the only building in Gotham that broke the “B” barrier, there were other impressive deals: Miki Naftali laid out $810 million for 800 Fifth Avenue. (While we don’t know yet what Naftali is planning, we can assume at that price it’s going to be something spectacular.) Blackstone plunked down $644 million for a 49 percent stake in 1345 Avenue of the Americas. A couple of blocks away, a JV between Norges Bank Investment Management and Beacon Capital Partners purchased 1177 Avenue of the Americas from Silverstein Properties and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System for $572 million. And Weill Cornell’s medical school extended its campus by picking up Sotheby’s auction house at 1334 York Avenue for $510 million.

Lending also had an excellent year, with CMBS coming back with a bang. The big daddy was a $3.46 billion single-borrower CMBS deal financing 10 data centers across the country from Blackstone, followed by a $2.8 billion CMBS loan on grocery-anchored retail centers for (surprise, surprise) Blackstone. And while they wore the crown of the biggest CMBS loan in 2024 for their refi of Rockefeller Center (in one fell swoop, arguably reigniting the CMBS market) Tishman Speyer claimed third place in 2025 with their other major Gotham trophy: The Spiral, which they refinanced to the tune of $2.85 billion.

Where did all this leave things in the market generally?

Well, it was a … weird year.

Despite punishing and unpredictable tariffs and the fact that an avowed socialist was elected the next mayor of New York City, neither action really slowed the flow of overseas capital into the city.

Interest rates are slowly coming down to earth — just last week the Fed lowered them by 25 basis points — but this came with the warning that rates wouldn’t be coming down as fast and furious in 2026 as some might have hoped.

There were also big price cuts and a lot of positive stories to tell. In fact, they were linked.

“Price discovery, not rate cuts, restarted the market,” said Cushman & Wakefield’s Miles Treaster. “Buyers re-emerged when valuations were reset, particularly around office and multifamily, and, while the Fed repivoting was a seminal event for investors, it was price discovery that actually created enough clarity for capital to re-enter the market.”

Indeed, a report from Newmark found a 19 percent year-over-year increase in CRE investment through the end of the third quarter.

To wit, after years of losing tenants in a shaky office environment, Paramount Group (the real estate company, not the entertainment giant) proved to be an attractive enough company that Rithm Capital made a play worthy of its Gloria Estefan-like name for Paramount’s assets.

“We now have 13 million square feet of office in two of the best cities in the world — gateway cities here in the U.S., obviously: New York and San Francisco,” said Rithm’s Michael Nierenberg in an exclusive Sit-Down with Commercial Observer. “New York workers are well back to the office. In this portfolio, the properties are Class A, 90-plus-percent leased. And, I think, in San Francisco, the occupancy is in the low 70s, and you’re starting to see back-to-office in San Fran with the AI boom and everything else.”

The beat goes on….

While we might have been content to pack it in for 2025, no no. The deals keep coming.

Despite having just opened a new, 2.5 million-square-foot office tower, J.P. Morgan Chase nevertheless expanded its presence at L&L Holding Company’s 390 Madison Avenue by taking a 60,000-square-foot sublease and bringing its total footprint at the building to 496,905 square feet.

Brookfield’s Waterside Plaza got an $800 million recapitalization, and New Jersey-based Panepinto Properties got a $306 million senior loan from Kennedy Wilson and $78 million in preferred equity from Affinius Capital for a 678-unit project called Harborside 8 on the Jersey City waterfront.

There were hirings like Aaron Cukier going to CBRE after a stint at Extell Development, and Kenneth Salzman and Seth Rosen leaving Lee & Associates NYC for Cresa.

But as we get closer to the holidays, we’re all thinking about tariffs — er, sorry, presents. And retail was very much on our mind, maybe because of ICSC this week. (Speaking of retail, did you hear that a Whole Foods is coming to Queens?)

“I think the fundamentals haven’t changed in that you have a small part of the population spending an outsize amount in the market, so 10 percent of the households represent about 50 percent of the retail spending of Americans — that’s a pretty significant delta,” said JLL’s Naveen Jaggi at the Javits Center last week. “[But retailers] have to keep a close eye on the consumers, because that may impact the speed at which they open stores.”

There were many other thoughts on the state of retail. You can read all our ICSC 2025 coverage here.

Happy Hanukkah!

See you next week.