10 of the Biggest Office Leases in Brooklyn & Queens in 2020

By: Hellen Zaboulani

As 2020 finally starts to wrap up, here are the year’s ten largest office leases for Brooklyn and Queens. Notably, only four of the top 10 office leases were signed after the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March. Also as evident, most of the leases are not big business expansions.

As reported by the Real Deal, the total square footage for the top 10 office leases signed in 2020 was 1.44 million square feet, or 20 percent higher than the total in 2019. That increase is mostly attributed to Whittle School’s 620,000-square-foot lease in Downtown Brooklyn, signed in early February. Amazon’s 300,000-square-foot lease in Queens, also signed in February also gave 2020 a boost.

At the top of the Real Deal’s list, the largest deal was the 20-year lease for the 10-story Whittle School & Studios at 181 Livingston Street, Brooklyn’s Fulton Street.

As previously mentioned, the second on the list was Amazon’s lease of office, retail and warehouse space at 66-26 Metropolitan Avenue, Glendale. Jeff Bezos’s company inked a deal for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 109,000-square-foot of space, and added on190,000 square feet of vacant space at RentarPlaza. This was the only deal in Queens that made the top 10.

The third largest deal was City Harvest’s 150,000 square foot lease for 150 52nd Street, Sunset Park in Brooklyn. The city’s largest food rescue organization will move its former Long Island City headquarters as well as operations to the new site. The next on the list is another Brooklyn lease for 87,000 square feet taken on by National Grid. In February, the electric and gas provider took on the 11th and 12th floors of the Atlantic Terminal downtown office building.

Fifth on the Real Deal list is 61,000 square feet of space at 124 Ninth Street in Gowanus. An advertising company, Mother New York, inked the deal moving its office out of Hell’s Kitchen. Next is co-living company Quarters’ lease of 55,000 square feet at 186 North Sixth Street, in Williamsburg. Number 7 was Brooklyn Hospital Center’s 51,226-square-foot lease for administrative offices at a healthcare building in downtown Fulton Street.

Next, Amazon Music penned a deal for 40,000 square feet of production or studio space at 25 Kent Avenue in Williamsburg. The United States Marshals Service also took on 40,000 square feet of space at 34 34th Street, Sunset Park. Lastly, on the list, Goodwill, the nonprofit renewed its office lease for 30,800 square feet in downtown Brooklyn.