Peter Riguardi

In what everyone acknowledges was a bad year for office leasing, Peter Riguardi had two lease deals in New York that broke the 200,000-square-foot mark and a third that fell barely 6,000 square feet short.

Last May, Riguardi, along with Matt Astrachan, Ken Siegel, Mitch Konsker and Will McGarry, nabbed 263,000 square feet for HSBC Bank at Tishman Speyer’s 66 Hudson Boulevard (aka The Spiral) in one of the top 10 biggest deals of the year.

Down the block, Riguardi put KKR into 219,395 square feet at Related’s 30 Hudson Yards. Across town, he found 194,466 square feet for Morgan Stanley at Fisher Brothers’s 55 East 52nd Street. (He also found the bank 37,800 square feet at 1 New York Plaza.)

And Riguardi, whose roster of tenant clients is one of the very best in the business, has not been content to simply stay local. In San Francisco — which has been experiencing record high vacancy rates — Riguardi landed 206,000 square feet for BlackRock at 400 Howard Street, and got Morgan Stanley into 131,728 square feet at 555 California Street.

But there was one renewal that reminded us of the good old days — the days when a half-million-square-foot renewal was par for the course and not something that had to be approached with fingers crossed and cradling a rabbit’s foot — and that was Wells Fargo’s 10-year, 657,114-square-foot renewal at San Francisco’s 333 Market Street in June.

Of course, Riguardi is just as robust on the ownership side, and inked deals at 375 Park Avenue (getting Blue Owl Capital in 137,660 square feet for RFR), 437 Madison Avenue (getting Santander in 160,333 square feet at the Kaufman Organization-owned property) and the Durst Organization’s One World Trade Center.

It was a tough year for everybody, Riguardi acknowledged to Commercial Observer. But his team has rolled up their sleeves, kept their eyes on the prize, and are grinding out leases across the country.