By: Mario Mancini
As more and more people continue to work at home instead of commuting to an office, landlords are upgrading their buildings in order to attract more tenants. The New York Post reports that Park Avenue is experiencing a renaissance as major improvement projects are completed.
Steve Cuozzo writes SL Green purchased 450 Park for $455 million and took control of 245 Park after bringing it out of bankruptcy; Mutual of America tapped Munich Re as a 25% partner in 320 Park, and Fisher Brothers spent $20 million to modernize 299 Park. Tishman Speyer is bringing giant new restaurants to the MetLife tower at 200 Park.
He adds that the latest to report strong returns from a capital improvement program is the Stahl Organization’s 277 Park Ave. between East 47th and 48th streets, where six recent leases — new ones, extensions and expansions — total nearly 270,000 square feet.
The changes began in 2018 to “future-proof the building,” said the chief leasing agent, Cushman & Wakefield’s Mark P. Boisi. When completed by year’s end, they’ll include an impressive new entrance, a new Park Avenue lobby with a 30-foot ceiling, a redesigned Lexington Avenue lobby, a high-end tenants’ fitness center on the ground floor and new restaurants from famed chef David Burke — “the whole magilla” of improvements that tenants now expect, Boisi said.
“That value proposition has really attracted an elite tenant base,” said Boisi, who represented Stahl in all the new leases along with Cushman’s Bryan Boisi and Gordon Hough.
Cushman & Wakefield is, according to their Wikipedia page, among the world’s largest commercial real estate services firms, with revenues of US$9.4 billion in 2021. The company operates from approximately 400 offices in 60 countries, has around 50,000 employees and manages about 4,100 million sq ft (380 million m2) of commercial space. It is one of the “Big Three” commercial real estate services companies, alongside CBRE and JLL.
Cushman & Wakefield was founded in New York City on October 31, 1917, by brothers-in-law J. Clydesdale Cushman and Bernard Wakefield.
In the 1960s, Cushman & Wakefield began a national expansion, establishing offices throughout the U.S.
Another major trend, reported by Steve Cuozzo for The New York Post, is real estate developers getting into the restaurant business in a major way. The Howard Hughes Corporation’s recent purchase of a $55 million chunk of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s global restaurant company made one thing clear: It’s getting harder to tell where the restaurant world ends and the real estate world begins.
Although simple-minded pundits blame the closing of every “iconic” bagel shop on greedy landlords, the fact is that New York City restaurateurs depend on developers to fund and support new eateries more than ever.
Hughes, which operates the South Street Seaport under a long-term lease with the city, already brought Vongerichten’s acclaimed seafood brasserie the Fulton to Pier 17 and opened Vongerichten’s colossal Tin Building food market and eatery complex at the pier, Cuozzo writes.
