MetLife Expands to 500K SF at 200 Park Avenue
By Mark Hallum November 5, 2026 3:44 pm
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MetLife isn’t letting anyone forget whose name is on the building.
The insurance company signed an expansion deal at the Irvine Company’s 200 Park Avenue — better known as the MetLife Building — to grow its footprint from roughly 450,000 to roughly 500,000 square feet in the 59-story building, according to CBRE.
The new 10-year expansion lease was for 47,628 square feet, the brokerage said. MetLife was last known to have leased roughly 400,000 square feet in its namesake building, and it’s not known when it expanded to roughly 450,000 square feet.
CBRE did not disclose the asking rent, but the average office asking rent in Midtown was $86.49 per square foot in October, according to CBRE’s monthly office report.
CBRE’s Mary Ann Tighe, Howard Fiddle, Peter Turchin, Evan Haskell, Brett Shannon and Julia Passante negotiated the deal on behalf of the landlord, while Patrick Murphy at JLL represented MetLife.
MetLife owned the property starting in 1981 when it bought it from Pan American Airways for $400 million. The insurance firm later sold the building to Tishman Speyer and Irvine Company in 2005 for $1.72 billion — a record price, at the time.
Its last publicly announced lease extension for its office space on Park Avenue was in 2023, when it committed to another 11 years in place. The deal marked the sixth largest office lease of that year.
Other tenants in the building include law firm Gibson Dunn, which renewed its 361,569-square-foot office in January, as well as law firm Winston & Strawn, which also renewed its 237,815-square-foot lease in December 2024.
Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.
