Steven Roth

If you were to look at the top 10 New York City office leases of last year, the first spot went to New York University taking 1.183 million square feet at Vornado’s 770 Broadway.

No. 3 on that same list saw Bloomberg leasing 946,815 square feet at 731 Lexington Avenue, which is also owned by Vornado.

For the No. 7 slot, Apple took nearly 400,000 square feet at Penn 11, owned by … you guessed it.

Seeing a pattern here?

Even at 83 years old, CEO Steven Roth seems to be pulling Vornado Realty Trust away from the low-water mark of the pandemic-induced remote-work trend.

While some analysts predicted that Roth’s hypothetical retirement would cause Vornado’s stock to soar, Roth showed he still had plenty of fight left in him. (Witness all those leases we just mentioned.)

Indeed, Roth announced in February that the real estate investment trust was profitable by $1.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, a marked improvement to the net loss of $61 million during the same period in 2023.

Revenue also increased to $457.8 million in the fourth quarter compared to $441.8 million in the last quarter of 2023. That led Roth to make one of his trademark bold statements on earnings calls, declaring that the work-from-home trend has ended. “Most [workers] have left their kitchen tables and are back at the office,” he said.

Regardless, Roth seems to be turning to an asset class other investors have been hedging toward for a while now, considering the city’s housing crisis.

“People really want to live in New York. There is a major shortage of apartments in New York,” Roth said in his annual letter to shareholders released April 9. “So why aren’t we building some apartments? A very good question.”

Given the sudden fluidity in demand for workspaces, it remains to be seen if Vornado will be building apartments in the Penn District of Manhattan, where it dominates, or if it will unshelve its plans for an office tower where the Hotel Pennsylvania once stood.

That would mean abandoning Roth’s plans for an office “promised land” across from Pennsylvania Station following its failed efforts with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to transform the transit hub in a $7.5 billion public-private partnership. That plan fell apart in late 2022.

But, now, the federal government has seized control of the Penn Station redevelopment, and it’s anyone’s guess what happens next or what Vornado’s role will be. But remember what we said a few paragraphs ago? Don’t count Steven Roth out.