Peter Riguardi

Peter Riguardi.

#16

Peter Riguardi

President and Chairman of Tri-State New York Region at JLL

Last year's rank: 13

Peter Riguardi
By May 15, 2023 9:00 AM

If you look at some of the biggest tenants in New York City — HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York, Condé Nast, AIG and BlackRock — they have one thing in common: Peter Riguardi is their broker.

And these companies have been making moves that should generally make the real estate community sleep a little easier at night. Earlier this month one such client, HSBC, announced it was taking 265,000 square feet of space at 66 Hudson Boulevard, aka The Spiral.

It’s the kind of deal that restores so much faith in the New York real estate market that once was par for the course: a big tenant; more than a quarter million square feet of office space; a new development serving as the company’s home.

That’s the kind of deal that Riguardi has been doing all year long. For instance, he brought Morgan Stanley into the Fisher Brothers’ Park Avenue Plaza in January. “I moved BlackRock out of there,” Riguardi said of the 400,000-square-foot space that BlackRock is leaving for 50 Hudson Yards in 2023. “So, for me, it felt good to move them out and refill the space.”

Both on a landlord and tenant level Riguardi is unmatched. Aside from being the building broker for such spanking-new projects as the former Hyatt Hotel at 175 Park Avenue that RXR and TF Cornerstone are developing, and the Moinian Group’s 3 Hudson Boulevard, Riguardi has been doing deals across the city and the country.

Quietly throughout 2021 he has been advising WeWork on restructuring its portfolio, renegotiating and buying out some of its leases. (Although Riguardi declined to talk about just how much he helped WeWork cull from its portfolio, sources told Commercial Observer that the number is somewhere around $300 million worth of obligations.)

On the West Coast, he led the 200,000-plus-square-foot renewal of BlackRock at its San Francisco offices, and moved Citibank into a 75,000-square-foot office.

“I think that from the aspect of returning to work we took tremendous strides and it’s starting to feel like normal,” Riguardi said. “There were a couple of stops and starts, but I feel good about the return to work.”