SL Green Posts Strong Income, Leasing and Occupancy Metrics in 2024

After a couple of difficult years under the cloud of COVID-19, SL Green Realty is sitting pretty as it enters 2025. 

The New York office real estate investment trust announced strong fourth-quarter 2024 earnings Thursday, as the firm reported $131.9 million in funds from operations (FFO). The cash flow total is significantly up from the $49.7 million in FFO the REIT reported for the same period in 2023. 

Moreover, it wasn’t just the fourth quarter that went well for SL Green. The firm reported FFO of $569.8 million for the entire 2024, a 67 percent improvement over the $341.3 million in FFO from last year.   

CEO Marc Holliday, speaking during Thursday’s third-quarter earnings call, called 2024 “a pinnacle year, where we achieved so much.” Holliday noted the firm had successfully stuck to its guns, despite several difficult quarters and headline-making departures of senior leadership between 2021 and early 2024. 

S&P Global had previously dropped SL Green’s credit rating from BBB- to BB+ in December 2022, and the overall occupancy of the firm’s buildings was below 90 percent as recently as October 2023. 

“Having come through some fairly tough years, it was nice to see our strategy pay big dividends for our shareholders, as we posted market-leading returns,” said Holliday. “It was a great affirmation of a strategy we stuck to. We hung in there, and now we’re entering … possibly some of the best years we’ve possibly ever had at this company, given the dynamics of this current market.” 

The firm’s stock currently trades at $67 per share, 33 percent less than its high of $100 per share in February 2020. The stock price had reached a post-pandemic high of $80 per share in October 2024. That’s a marked improvement from the post-pandemic low of $20.50 in March 2023 during the regional banking crisis, but still a ways off from the high of $160 per share it saw in 2007. 

Holliday also praised the firm’s leasing, noting that SL Green ended 2024 at 92.5 percent occupancy and projects that number to hit 93.5 percent in 2025. 

“Our business is fundamentally about filling office buildings with tenants, and when we get close to that 93 percent occupancy range, that’s when we can really begin to push rents, rein in concessions, and see building values increase at above-average rates,” said Holliday. 

The leases came fast and furious in the fourth quarter. SL Green secured 48 leases across 1.7 million square feet in the fourth quarter of 2024, helping bring the firm’s leasing total to 188 closings for 3.6 million square feet last year. SL Green’s mark-to-market on Manhattan leases signed in 2024 came out nearly 9 percent higher on the year. 

Notable deals include IBM signing a 93,000-square-foot expansion at One Madison Avenue, Traveler’s Indemnity Company signing a 122,788-square-foot expansion at 485 Lexington Avenue, Veriton Group N.Y. expanding its space at 245 Park Avenue by 72,000 square feet, and Ares Capital Management adding 38,000 square feet at the same Park Avenue office. 

Moreover, Bloomberg signed an early renewal and expansion at 919 Third Avenue for a stunning 924,816 square feet in the fourth quarter, one of the biggest leases in the city in 2024. 

Holiday attributed the “real scarcity of well-located, amenitized space” in Manhattan for the firm’s strong leasing metrics. 

“The reality is inventory will only get scarcer in the coming years due to the imbalance between timeline for demand and the reality of when space can be delivered,” he said. “Space is going to be even more constrained.”

Matthew DiLiberto, chief financial officer at SL Green, told investors that the strong earnings to close out 2024 were driven by better leasing at its properties, higher net operating income, improved fee income numbers, the strong performance of The Summit observatory at One Vanderbilt, and incremental debt and preferred equity investing.  

“The fourth quarter was well ahead of our expectations from an earnings perspective,” said DiLiberto. “​​We said we’d be out searching for new investments primarily on the debt side, the equity raise we did in November would also help fund that, we did some of that investing, and we recognized the incremental income in late December of those investments.”

To this end, SLG Green launched its SLG Opportunistic Debt Fund, which Holliday announced during last year’s fourth-quarter earnings call, with the stated intention of securing $1 billion to invest in distressed New York City office. The firm secured the closing of $250 million from a Canadian institutional investor in 2024. 

“The good news is we expect to have opportunities to deploy and to continue our historically successful debt and preferred platform in this fully discretionary fund format,” said Holliday. “I think it’s a real feather in the cap of this team and this platform.”  

Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com