Sunday Summary: Silverstein Blazes His Fastball

We could begin this summary of last week with the elephant in the room: Tariffs, tariffs, state of the union addresses and more tariffs (or, wait… fewer tariffs?) But we’ll get to that.

The big news of the week from a commercial real estate standpoint had to be the fact that industry hall of famer Larry Silverstein bagged the kind of lease and tenant that should remind any industry vet of the good old days.

American Express has finalized its deal to be the anchor tenant of Silverstein Properties’ long-planned 2 million-square-foot 2 World Trade Center, taking a whopping 55 floors to serve as the company’s global headquarters.

“Building 2 World Trade Center will bring another iconic skyscraper to Lower Manhattan, create thousands of good-paying union jobs and provide billions in economic benefits to New Yorkers,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said in touting the deal.

If AmEx had been looking for a key-ready global headquarters in someplace near, say, Grand Central, they probably would have been out of luck. They needed something new. They needed something spacious. And they needed something Downtown — because the fact of the matter is, prime Midtown office space is at its tightest inventory in quite some time.

“The top 50 buildings in Midtown have a less than 3.7 percent availability rate,” said Newmark’s David Falk.

“Obviously, we’ve had the best year in nearly a decade, with financial and legal services always being the drivers for Midtown,” Avison Young’s Peter Johnson said of 2025. “The vacancy and absorption rates say it all. With this huge flight to quality, tenants are not necessarily preferring location. They prefer quality, because everything’s been gobbled up.”

This is not to say that there aren’t a handful of other trophy properties in the works, like 350 Park Avenue. But when you look at the kinds of rents that new properties are commanding (and setting for the rest of the market) you can understand why striking a deal on a 2 million-square-foot property out of the Plaza District makes a lot of sense in this kind of environment.

OK, let’s talk about tariffs

Nope. Because there were sales, leases and financings galore last week, and we’re going to get happy about that before we switch to tariffs.

Here’s the top 10 deals that we saw (in no particular order):

No. 1: GO Residential REIT is buying three residential towers: Ivy Tower at 350 West 43rd Street for $150.5 million from Friedman Management, and 411 West 35th Street and 444 West 35th Street for $230 million from Maddd Equities and Joy Construction. Newmark’s Adam Spies, Doug Harmon, Adam Doneger and Avery Silverstein represented the sellers — and the Newmark team had a particularly good week because they also arranged …

No. 2: Tishman Speyer and GIC selling the 70-story, 377,000-square-foot office/condo hybrid CitySpire to DelShah Capital and A.M. Property Holding Corporation for $135.7 million. (Newmark’s Marcelo Fasulo and Josh King were also in on that deal. No wonder that Newmark is exceeding analyst expectations — as per their earnings call.)

No. 3: We were pumping our fists over the fact that Fanatics, the sports company, just took over all 210,000 square feet of 95 Morton Street in the Village.

No. 4: Bally’s plunked down $156.6 million for the Bronx golf course where they’re planning to build one of three casinos that New York State officials approved in December.

No. 5: Cologix spent $375 million buying 472,913 square feet worth of data centers in Ashburn, Va., from Merritt Properties.

No. 6: Stephen Ross’s Related Ross refinanced Esperanté Corporate Center in Downtown West Palm Beach, Fla., to the tune of $145 million.

No. 7: MDH Partners purchased five industrial properties in California, Texas, Utah and Tennessee for $105 million.

No. 8: Eyal Ofer’s Global Holdings refinanced its Midtown South NoMad Tower for … wait for it … $450 million!

No. 9: Scott Rechler’s RXR and One Investment Management secured $475 million in tax equity and construction loans for their office-to-residential conversion at 61 Broadway from Apollo Global Management (who provided them with $420 million of construction debt) and J.P. Morgan Chase (who stepped in with $55 million in tax equity investment).

And, finally, No. 10: The Cyprus-based investment firm Yoda PLC is purchasing Transamerica Pyramid Center in San Francisco from Michael Shvo. (No word yet on how much Yoda spent. But guess a lot we do.)

Can we talk about tariffs yet?

Not quite. We’re still wrapping up earnings calls like the Newmark one we mentioned earlier.

Starwood Property Trust had a lot to be happy about, reporting fourth-quarter net income of $96.9 million — a jump of more than $24 million from the previous quarter. They also could boast $12.7 billion in deployed capital last year and a record $30.7 billion in assets.

Vici Properties talked on their call about the seven casinos they purchased last year from Golden Entertainment for $1.16 billion.

“We acknowledge that the Las Vegas Strip had a relatively softer 2025 compared to prior years,” said Vici COO John Payne on the call, “but as we discussed over the last few quarters, we view 2025 as more of a normalization than a pullback.” Fair enough.

The call that sounded kind of disastrous was Hudson Pacific Properties, which posted $277.9 million in losses for the fourth quarter of 2025, and $572.5 million in losses for all of 2025. And this is not just one bad year — they lost $354.1 million in 2024, $192.2 million in 2023, and recorded a $56.5 million loss in 2022.

Fine, let’s talk about tariffs

To be honest, we don’t know where the tariff situation is headed. And we’re not the only ones — nobody in the business quite knows what to make of last month’s Supreme Court decision and the Trump administration’s fiery pledge to keep pursuing tariffs anyway.

“Tariff uncertainty is one of the worst threats to sustained infrastructure investment this country faces,” New York Building Congress President and CEO Carlo Scissura said in a statement. “The recent SCOTUS decision gave some clarity to the invalidity of previous tariffs, but the immediate pivot by the administration to announce new tariffs” means builders can’t source materials or plan future projects.

Likewise, a lot of people in finance are scratching their heads.

“On one hand it provides some clarity as to the administration’s ability to single-handedly implement tariffs,” said Aasif Bade, founder and CEO of industrial real estate developer Ambrose. “On the other hand, being very frank, it seemed things had finally settled down, and corporate decision-makers had a position they could somewhat rely on. … So it did create a new uncertainty from that standpoint of ‘Where does this go and how will President Trump react?’”

Some have made plans that seemed to be proceeding along, no matter where the tariff ball lands. Emirates Global Aluminum and Century Aluminum Company announced back in January they were building a new aluminum production plant in Inola, Okla. — and they’re, uh, forging ahead with it.

“[The project] is evocative of the need for national security reasons and economic independence reasons for us to bring more of our manufacturing jobs onshore,” said John Budd, CEO of the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. “For decades, more and more manufacturing has been moved overseas, and there’s always going to be some of that, but securing some production here locally will be beneficial in terms of driving our industry.”

Of course, tariffs were not the only political footballs sailing through the sky last week.

The bromance between New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump continued when the two met at the White House last Thursday and discussed the plan to build 12,000 affordable units in Sunnyside Yards.

In the spirit of DOGE-like austerity, the U.S. General Services Administration and the Department of Agriculture are officially trying to unload the 2 million-square-foot (and mostly vacant) Agriculture South building at 1400 Independence Avenue SW in Washington, D.C.

And the seemingly deceased plan for rent control of retail storefronts in New York City called the Small Business Jobs Survival Act is back from the dead.

Sunday reading

But stay away from politics this Sunday. Take a break, and read about one of the great brokers in the biz — JLL’s Paul Glickman.

“He’s one of those guys that just always is in the thick of it,” said Craig Panzirer, senior vice president and director of leasing for Global Holdings Management Group. “Some people have it and some people don’t, and he has it.”

How’d Glickman get it? And what does he do with it? Read about it here.

See you next week!