Mary Ann Tighe

While the pandemic was slow for many office leasing brokers, Mary Ann Tighe closed nearly 4 million square feet of deals in 2020. The first quarter of 2020 was a brisk time for Tighe, who completed 3 million square feet of leasing before the pandemic ground New York’s market to a halt. 

Her work included three office expansions of at least 150,000 square feet each for current clients; 170,000 square feet of leasing at MetroTech in Downtown Brooklyn; and the sale of a residential co-op building at 417 Park Avenue to GDSNY, which plans to tear down the apartments and construct an office building. 

She also helped the nonprofit Rockefeller Foundation lease 74,000 square feet of Major League Baseball’s former offices at 245 Park Avenue. And, in February 2020, Tighe and her team oversaw a 620,000-square-foot lease for Whittle School and Studios, which took all of Tishman Speyer’s The Wheeler project in Downtown Brooklyn. 

During the pandemic, she arranged 500,000 square feet of short-term leases for tenants who had leases expiring in 2022 or 2023, and were unsure what the office market would look like in the long term. 

“Everyone wanted rent deferrals or forgiveness, everybody was preparing space for sublease, everyone wanted to navigate work from home, everyone wanted to explore new geographies for offices,” Tighe said. “And, when I wasn’t doing that, I was working with owners of buildings who wanted to bring back tenants.” 

She worked on repositionings and redevelopment projects at the Flatiron Building, 1740 Broadway, 550 Madison Avenue and 525 West 57th Street. Outside of brokerage, Mayor Bill de Blasio tapped Tighe last May for a 30-person real estate advisory council focused on COVID recovery. 

“It was a great committee that worked very hard for 120 days, but we didn’t succeed in getting a lot of our projects done,” she said. Her panel worked with restaurants to navigate the constantly changing outdoor dining regulations. But she felt that the administration should have done more to help small businesses, including abating commercial rent taxes and assigning a caseworker to help business owners navigate government bureaucracy.—R.B.R.