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By Hellen Zaboulani
Brookfield Properties scored a large lease for space at its trophy office tower at Two Manhattan West in Hudson Yards.
As reported by Crain’s NY, global financial firm BBVA announced that it will take on 74,000 square feet of space at Brookfield’s office building and move its New York headquarters there. BBVA, which is based in Madrid, Spain and boasts multiple offices around the world, plans to move into the Hudson Yards office tower by the end of 2024, with its space being concentrated on the eighth and ninth floors of the new 58-story building. Brookfield declined to share the asking rent price and length of the lease, only saying that it’s a long-term deal. Commercial real estate database CoStar estimates that space at the building rents for about $75 to $91 per square foot.
BBVA currently occupies about 36,000 square feet of space at 1345 Sixth Ave., the 50-story trophy tower by developer Fisher Brothers, located in Midtown Manhattan between 54th and 55th street, as per CoStar. BBVA, which stands for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A., is a Spanish multinational financial services company founded in 1857, and was recognized as the country’s overall best-performing bank by “The Banker”. The publicly traded company boasted revenue of €24.89 billion ($27.2 billion) in 2022, and net income of €6.420 billion ($7.02 billion) in 2022. The company had entered the U.S. in 2004, expanding until it was named one of the 30 largest banks in the US in 2018.
A representative for the Fisher Brothers declined to comment.
Brookfield, led by CEO Brian Kingston, just recently completed construction of Two Manhattan West, a 935-foot-tall skyscraper, which offers 1.9 million square feet of commercial space. It is the last skyscraper in the real estate giant’s eight-acre, 6-building Manhattan West mixed-use development, which spans about 7 million square feet in total– featuring four office towers, one boutique hotel, one residential building, 225,000 square feet of retail space and a 2.5-acre public plaza. Two Manhattan West, the 58-story office building, is now 80 percent leased, after the BBVA deal. The building’s first tenants are scheduled to move in early 2024, per Brookfield. Other prominent tenants who have inked leases at the tower include: accounting firm KPMG, investment firm the D.E. Shaw Group, and law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. The building, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, offers amenities including lobbies, a 3,200-square-foot landscaped terrace, 200 parking spots, bike storage, conference centers, and a fitness and wellness center. The building’s base also includes 200,000 square feet of retail space.
Per Crain’s, the recently inked lease comes amid a slump for office space in Manhattan. Since the Covid-19 pandemic struck over three years ago, the closures and remote and hybrid work options have led to more vacancies at Big Apple offices. Midtown South, which includes Hudson Yards, has already been encouraged with two important leases being signed in October. One is by Ralph Lauren, which renewed its lease of roughly 256,000 square feet at the famed 19-story Starrett-Lehigh Building, which occupies the full block between Eleventh Avenue and 26th Street. The other was by LinkedIn, which opted to expand its approximately 144,000-square-foot lease at the iconic Empire State Building, per data from Colliers.
