Hudson Square Is Winning the 2026 Office Market

A dwindling roster of quality office supply citywide is turning New York’s Hudson Square’s elevated availability rate into an asset.

The Midtown South neighborhood had the third-highest office availability rate in Manhattan at the end of 2026’s first quarter, at 19.4 percent, according to Colliers data. The relative glut of opportunity there — paired with big-name tenants, large floor plates and pricey building upgrades — has attracted a rush of large leases to Hudson Square this year.

CBRE’s Paul Amrich and Howard Fiddle have been especially busy in the neighborhood. The pair leads an exclusive leasing team for the 13-property portfolio of Hudson Square Properties.

“Manhattan is going through something now that I’ve never experienced in my 30-year career, which is a lack of quality supply,” Amrich said. “The quality supply is dwindling very quickly, almost on a monthly basis. Because of that, you’re seeing other districts of town that maybe historically weren’t as robust really kicking into high gear, and I think Hudson Square is that district.” 

Hudson Square Properties, made up of longtime landowner Trinity Church alongside Norges Bank and Hines, announced its first large lease of 2026 in January, when PayPal signed on for 261,000 square feet at portfolio poster child 345 Hudson Street. Large lease renewals by software developer Notion, at 75 Varick Street, and creative production firm RadicalMedia, at 435 Hudson Street, quickly followed. Health platform Tennr joined on at No. 345 in May, taking 125,000 square feet. 

It’s not just Hudson Square Properties enjoying the influx, either. Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is rumored to be closing in on AEW Capital Management’s entire 465,630-square-foot 330 Hudson Street, Commercial Observer reported in April.

Once the domain of the city’s 20th-century printing and graphics industry, Hudson Square has slowly built up a roster of creative and tech industries. Google and Disney were particularly pivotal arrivals to the neighborhood in 2018. Google assembled an urban campus that today spans leases at 315 and 345 Hudson streets, and a $2.1 billion headquarters at St. John’s Terminal, or 550 Washington Street. Disney took up a 99-year, $650 million ground lease from Trinity Church at 7 Hudson Square, where it opened its 19-story headquarters in 2024.

These mega-corporations gave Hudson Square an impressive vote of confidence, but the pandemic put a substantial pause on attracting new arrivals. Hudson Square Properties was in the midst of a costly repositioning of its assets to welcome an expected wave of tech tenants when the pandemic hit, said Frank Wallach, executive managing director at Colliers. The subsequent drop-off in tech leasing activity resulted in a surge of vacant, expensive supply.

Despite the bad timing, Hudson Square emerged excellently positioned for the city’s AI boom. 

“I think that over the next 12 months there’s a good chance that virtually all of our space in 13 buildings will be leased,” CBRE’s Fiddle said. 

For the largest companies in New York City, as few as 10 office spaces over 100,000 square feet are available citywide within the next 12 months, according to Wallach. Lucky for Hudson Square, two of those spaces reside within its confines. 

Leasing volume in the neighborhood more than doubled year-over-year between 2024 and 2025, according to JLL data, largely thanks to Horizon Media’s 359,000-square-foot renewal at 75 Varick and Paypal’s relocation. The same report tracked an increase in average office asking rents of more than 17 percent over the last three years, from $77.12 per square foot at the start of 2023 to $90.50 per square foot in the first quarter of this year.  

Early-inning arrivals, like tech-y bedding brand Brooklinen, met with office rents that are no longer possible today, said JLL’s Joseph Sipala. Sipala, alongside Ian Lipman, oversaw the young company’s relocation from its hip home in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood to Hudson Square in 2024. It selected a 10-year, 32,000-square-foot lease at Hudson Square Properties’ 225 Varick Street in late 2024. 

“The market then was not as active as it is now,” Sipala said, but the writing was on the exposed brick wall. In Hudson Square, the growing company found a rare space that could accommodate its offices and studio all under one roof, with room to grow down the line. 

The neighborhood’s signature industrial look and adjacency to cool-factor neighborhoods like SoHo, Tribeca and the West Village helped attract marketing firm Red Antler to the area from Dumbo around the same time. 

It’s not just the office sector that’s reaping the rewards of the current moment. In April, MAG Partners and Global Holdings announced plans to develop a 149-unit residential tower at 122 Varick Street, in a ground lease deal with — you guessed it — Hudson Square Properties. 

Andrew Staniforth, MAG Partners’ newly appointed co-head of development, said the 192,000-square-foot plans ride “the second wave of Hudson Square,” following the 2013 rezoning that made residential development in the neighborhood possible. 

“They set up the underlying zoning for a live work play community in Manhattan,” Staniforth said of city officials back then. “It was inevitable that it was going to happen, and I think we’re just now seeing it come to fruition.”

The building’s ground-floor retail will be in good company, with buzzy brands like Trader Joe’s, Equinox and Warby Parker having arrived in recent years. The Hudson Square Business Improvement District counts 150 storefronts in the neighborhood, according to Samara Karasyk, president of the Hudson Square BID. The BID estimates that the neighborhood is patronized by an estimated 55,000 visitors each day, and it’s finding that companies founded in the area tend to stay.

“Companies are choosing the neighborhood because it offers a differentiated experience in a highly competitive market,” Jason Alderman, head of Hines’ New York office, said in a statement. “The neighborhood has reached a point where office leasing momentum, retail activity, hospitality, dining and residential growth are all reinforcing each other.”

Still, a surplus of availability is worth keeping an eye on. The crown jewel of Hudson Square Properties’ portfolio, 345 Hudson, has a 165,000-square-foot vacancy since Google opted to vacate and search for a subleaser in early 2025. Amrich isn’t worried, though. 

“They invested close to $600 million [in 345 Hudson] over the last four years, and a lot of vacancy exists in that building,” Amrich said. “However, the momentum we’re seeing in the market today, largely the tech sector and even other sectors, we believe we’re going to be largely successful there from a leasing standpoint this year.”

Emily Davis can be reached at edavis@commercialobserver.com.