Legislation agency Goodwin Procter’s deliberate transfer from the New York Instances constructing on Eighth Avenue to BXP’s 200 Fifth Ave. in Flatiron says lots about immediately’s industrial market.
The relocation in late 2026 represents solely modest short-term progress — from 216,000 sq. toes at its previous digs to 250,000 sq. toes — however the deal consists of growth choices within the constructing. The agency’s transfer is a stroke of religion in once-sleepy Midtown South, the place SL Inexperienced’s One Madison is now residence to IBM and Franklin Templeton’s New York headquarters.
Welcome to the mighty, ever-evolving Manhattan workplace market in 2025. Though saddled with too many out of date previous buildings and a hesitant lending setting, it’s in a vastly higher place than doomsayers dreamed of 5, and even two, years in the past.
A Newmark survey this month discovered that Manhattan’s workplace restoration has “defied the national narrative” — that’s, it clobbered different giant US cities each when it comes to quantity and proportion.
Knowledge from CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, Newmark, Savills, Colliers and Avison Younger differ by a half-percentage level right here or there, however all discovered the primary quarter of 2024 recorded probably the most leasing quantity because the fourth quarter of 2019 — plus-or-minus 12 million sq. toes.
The provision price fell to round 17%, the bottom in 5 years. It was underneath 15% in prime Midtown and underneath 10% on Park Avenue.
The primary quarter’s 5 largest leases have been all above 300,000 sq. toes. And — look ahead to it! — bodily workplace attendance, nonetheless regarded by some because the holy grail despite the fact that most giant landlords now say work-from-home is “in the rear-view mirror,” continued to its rise. The Partnership for New York Metropolis discovered March workplace attendance at 76% of pre-pandemic ranges, in contrast with 72% final yr.
However 5 years because the pandemic’s horror absolutely took maintain, it’s value a glance again at how prisoners-of-the-moment media organs seen the way forward for the Manhattan workplace market — and of New York Metropolis itself.
The New York Instances, which by no means discovered a perceived risk to free enterprise it didn’t get pleasure from, had this to say on Might 12, 2020:
The pandemic disaster felt “fundamentally different” (i.e., extra dire) than earlier ones, from the Spanish flu of 1918-19 to 9/11. “Companies are considering not just how to safely bring back employees, but whether all of them need to come back at all.”
In 2025, C-suite honchos are calling their troops again to their desks in droves.
The Instances beat the “ghost town” drum once more on Sept. 8, 2020, when it claimed that firms have been “showing even more hesitation about committing to the city long-term.”
Inform that to Citadel, Blackstone, Bloomberg, Alphabet and Amazon, which have proven insatiable appetites for extra space right here because the notorious 2020 lockdown ended.
As lately as April 2023, when the market confirmed early stirrings of a rebound, a Instances headline cited a “bleak outlook for Manhattan’s office space.”
Not solely leftists foresaw a industrial wipeout. The Wall Avenue Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote on Feb. 25, 2021, underneath the cheery headline “The Old New York Won’t Come Back,” “The office towers of Midtown are empty.” She continued that though “people will come back to office life to some degree,” the “closed shops in and around train stations and office buildings are not coming back.”
Actually, retail area at or close to Sixth Avenue, Brookfield Place, Moynihan Practice Corridor and the Fulton Transit Middle is drawing extra shops and eating places than prior to now — together with across the WSJ’s and the New York Publish’s residence at 1211 Sixth Ave., the place new resorts and eating places are nearly too many to rely.
Nonprofit organ The Metropolis headlined in Might 2023, “The city’s economy is recovering. The office market is not.”
And who can neglect the 2023 “Doom Loop Cycle?” That much-cited essay by a Columbia College scholar claimed that work at home spelled a “real estate apocalypse” that may inevitably collapse New York Metropolis’s municipal treasury.
At the moment we now have a brand new bogeyman: President Trump’s tariffs. We are able to count on panic over how they’ll depart Massive Apple landlords in a worse pickle than they gave the impression to be 5 years in the past.
Perhaps they may. However don’t pay them any consideration till the mud settles — which if latest historical past tells us something, it eventually all the time does.
