Marc Holliday

From his office high up at One Vanderbilt, Marc Holliday had reason to be pleased.

“It’s been an extraordinary first quarter,” Holliday said. After shaking off a sleepy, market-wide first half of 2023, SL Green did roughly 500,000 square feet of leasing in the fourth quarter of last year and an extraordinary 665,000 square feet in the first three months of 2024, two-thirds of which were new leases. Rents were robust — an average of $92 per square foot — and, for the first year since COVID, occupancy in its portfolio had ticked past 90 percent.

But with a giant like SL Green, strong leasing is never the whole story: Just this past quarter, the REIT did $2 billion in debt extensions and restructuring. “My goal is really to get almost four years of unimpeded runway, if you will, to have all of our indebtedness pretty much put to bed — from a maturity standpoint — to at least until 2028,” Holliday said.

The restructuring is a big deal. Like a lot of owners with office exposure, some of the cracks in the New York City office market were beginning to show in several SL Green properties that were falling on special service watchlists. The extensions SL Green bagged show the seriousness of institutional confidence in the largest office landlord in New York.

Now, according to Holliday, SL Green will switch from defense to offense.

In March, the REIT launched a $1 billion opportunistic debt fund to focus almost exclusively on New York City office, retail, hotel and multifamily, which Holliday expects to close this summer. And the REIT’s stock, which was hovering around $21 per share a year ago, has shot up 140 percent to $52.43 per share as of last week.

With a portfolio as large as SL Green’s, there are too many projects to mention: the Giorgio Armani Residences at 760 Madison Avenue, where the more expensive units are priced at $8,000 per square foot; 750 Third Avenue, which SL Green wants to convert to residences; a new Daniel Boulud steakhouse planned for One Madison — and on and on. SL Green has also proposed a casino at 1515 Broadway in Times Square in partnership with Caesars Entertainment and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. If SL Green pulls it off, this will be one of the ultimate coups of the 2020s.

Even new construction, which has long been an industry bugaboo, is not something Holliday is shying away from given the success of its One Vanderbilt and One Madison in recent years. “The city can’t just be a museum with building stock that’s 50 to 75 years old,” Holliday said. “[It] needs to reinvent itself with new product, and we and others have now shown that there is a significant demand and need in the market.”