Sunday Summary: It’s 2026 — Get Happy!

2025 is in the books. And it was pretty good! At least, Colliers used the words “watershed moment” in their look back at Manhattan office leasing, with nearly 12 million square feet of deals inked in the last quarter alone, and an overall jump to 41.9 million square feet of leases done in 2025, compared to 33.3 million in 2024.

Retail was likewise good news — mixed with some less-than-good news.

Specifically, holiday season numbers are starting to trickle in, and since Thanksgiving there’s been a 14.2 percent month-over-month increase in visits to shopping malls, according to MRI Software. Moreover, Placer.ai, saw a 3.1 percent spike in indoor mall foot traffic from Black Friday 2024 to Black Friday 2025.

However (there’s always a “however”) foot traffic dropped 1.6 percent if you look at all of November, according to MRI.

“While the buzz of early holiday promotions drove a powerful uplift in visits to shopping malls, particularly during Black Friday week, annual declines in foot traffic suggest that many shoppers continue to tread carefully with discretionary spending,” MRI wrote in announcing these figures.

It was a similarly mixed story with street retailers. Shoppers looked for bargains and were wary of overspending.

But the important thing is the future — and there are very good vibes going into 2026.

“I think 2026 looks to be a very good year in leasing and investment sales,” Cushman & Wakefield’s Bruce Mosler said of the office market in particular. “I think the trends will continue.”

That’s not just a hunch. Whatever ups and downs the NYC office market has endured, virtually no new inventory will be coming online in 2026 — and that favors landlords. “Almost every tenant that took space earlier, coming out of the pandemic, had to materially increase their space and expand as employees came back,” said RXR’s Scott Rechler. “Companies like IBM just ended up taking a lot more space than they thought they were going to need.”

Beyond office (and beyond Gotham) there are a lot of other assets to get excited about. Artificial intelligence, which has already commanded hundreds of billions of dollars in investment, is poised to shower billions more on data centers, which are already in the middle of an absolute construction frenzy.

“Roughly three-fourths of our [national] construction pipeline in data centers is pre-leased,” said JLL’s Carl Beardsley. “It is the most liquid side of the market for construction financing.”

And even housing — which suffered its first setback in years in 2025, with prices ticking down 1.4 percent nationally — is expected to see a lot of activity in 2026, with the National Association of Realtors predicting a 14 percent increase in sales of existing single-family homes. And, while mortgage rates are probably not going down to the halcyon days of 2 percent, they should be falling to 6 percent by 2027.

Getting in under the wire

Given how robust things were going for all of 2025, it’s no surprise we saw a few deals get inked before Andy Cohen began his yearly rant about Eric Adams.

Housing was the name of the game in New York.

Summit Properties USA has agreed to buy the bankrupt, 5,000-unit apartment portfolio owned by Pinnacle Group for $451.3 million — although it’s a messy situation, so we don’t know how it will eventually turn out.

John McCarthy’s Hubb NYC Properties shelled out $40 million to Adam America for the 70-unit 599 Baltic Street in Brooklyn.

L+M Development Partners, Urbane Development, The Bluestone Organization, Mega Group Development and Triangle Equities Development landed $278 million in construction financing for the 320-unit Arverne East Building D building, which is part of the 116-acre, 1,300-unit Arverne East master-planned development in Far Rockaway, Queens.

Avdoo plunked down $63 million for the office building at 68 King Street in Hudson Square which it plans to convert into luxury residential.

And, speaking of conversion, Lexin Capital likewise filed plans last week to convert 229 West 28th Street into 270 residential units.

But it wasn’t all housing — there were leases, too, like a Volkswagen dealer taking 66,500 square feet of warehouse space in Long Island City, Queens; or the Office of the New York State Attorney General expanding to 378,438 at 28 Liberty Street in FiDi. (We didn’t find out about that one until after the new year. But we’ll give it to 2025.)

Plus, the deals were not just in Gotham — iHeartMedia + Entertainment sold a 22-acre development site near the Hard Rock Stadium at 20700 Northwest 42nd Avenue in Miami Gardens, Fla., to Bluenest Development for $14 million.

Also in South Florida, Craig Robins’s Dacra, L Catterton and Brookfield Properties scored a $350 million refinancing for the 179,418-square-foot luxury retail mall, Paradise Plaza, at 151 Northeast 41st Street in north Miami.

The Frederick, Md.-based Matan Companies pre-leased a 202,600-square-foot industrial space from DPR Construction in Ashland, Va.

And, in Southern California, MGR Real Estate borrowed $57 million from Wells Fargo to purchase the three-building, 383,558-square-foot office complex called Orange City Square. (The full price Granite Properties got for the properties was $89 million.)

On that note, we’d sign off with a Happy New Year, but according to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” rules we just missed our window.

See you next week.