Law firm Goodwin Procter signs Park Ave lease – Business News
Law firm Goodwin Procter’s deliberate transfer from the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue to BXP’s 200 Fifth Ave. in Flatiron says a lot about at present’s industrial market.The relocation in late 2026 represents solely modest short-term growth — from 216,000 sq. ft at its previous digs to 250,000 sq. ft — however the deal consists of enlargement choices within the building. The firm’s transfer is a stroke of religion in once-sleepy Midtown South, the place SL Green’s One Madison is now home to IBM and Franklin Templeton’s New York headquarters. Welcome to the mighty, ever-evolving Manhattan workplace market in 2025. Although saddled with too many out of date previous buildings and a hesitant lending surroundings, it’s in a vastly higher place than doomsayers dreamed of 5, and even two, years in the past.
200 Fifth Ave. in Flatiron BXP
A Newmark survey this month discovered that Manhattan’s workplace restoration has “defied the national narrative” — that’s, it clobbered different massive US cities each in phrases of quantity and proportion.
Data from CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, Newmark, Savills, Colliers and Avison Young differ by a half-percentage level right here or there, however all discovered the primary quarter of 2024 recorded essentially the most leasing quantity because the fourth quarter of 2019 — plus-or-minus 12 million sq. ft.The availability fee fell to round 17%, the bottom in 5 years. It was underneath 15% in prime Midtown and underneath 10% on Park Avenue.
The first quarter’s 5 largest leases had been all above 300,000 sq. ft. And — watch for it! — bodily workplace attendance, nonetheless regarded by some because the holy grail though most massive landlords now say work-from-home is “in the rear-view mirror,” continued to its rise. The Partnership for New York City discovered March workplace attendance at 76% of pre-pandemic ranges, in contrast with 72% final yr.But 5 years because the pandemic’s horror absolutely took maintain, it’s price a look back at how prisoners-of-the-moment media organs seen the long run of the Manhattan workplace market — and of New York City itself.The New York Times, which by no means discovered a perceived menace to free enterprise it didn’t get pleasure from, had this to say on May 12, 2020:The pandemic disaster felt “fundamentally different” (i.e., more 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 back to their desks in droves.The Times beat the “ghost town” drum again on Sept. 8, 2020, when it claimed that firms had been “showing even more hesitation about committing to the city long-term.”
People strolling in Chinatown in August 2020. Getty Images
The New York Times building on Eighth Avenue. NurPhoto through Getty Images
Areas round Sixth Avenue, Brookfield Place, Moynihan Train Hall, and the Fulton Transit Center are drawing more shops and eating places than up to now Getty Images
Tell that to Citadel, Blackstone, Bloomberg, Alphabet and Amazon, which have proven insatiable appetites for more space right here because the notorious 2020 lockdown ended.As not too long ago as April 2023, when the market confirmed early stirrings of a rebound, a Times headline cited a “bleak outlook for Manhattan’s office space.”Not solely leftists foresaw a industrial wipeout. The Wall Street 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.”
In reality, retail space at or close to Sixth Avenue, Brookfield Place, Moynihan Train Hall and the Fulton Transit Center is drawing more shops and eating places than up to now — together with across the WSJ’s and the New York Post’s home at 1211 Sixth Ave., the place new motels and eating places are nearly too many to depend.
Nonprofit organ The City headlined in May 2023, “The city’s economy is recovering. The office market is not.”
And who can overlook the 2023 “Doom Loop Cycle?” That much-cited essay by a Columbia University scholar claimed that work from home spelled a “real estate apocalypse” that may inevitably collapse New York City’s municipal treasury.
Today we’ve a new bogeyman: President Trump’s tariffs. We can anticipate panic over how they’ll depart Big Apple landlords in a worse pickle than they appeared to be 5 years in the past.
Maybe they may. But don’t pay them any consideration till the mud settles — which if current historical past tells us something, it sooner or later at all times does.
