Downtown New York Towers Empty as Best Office Market Falters
By David M. Levitt
March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Downtown Manhattan, where demand for office space began to surge three years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is about to lose its spot as the best- performing U.S. market.
Vacancies may exceed 14 percent of the area’s 87 million square feet by late 2011, empty space that’s equivalent to four Empire State Buildings and the highest rate since 1997, according to property broker Cushman & Wakefield Inc. That doesn’t include the 4.4 million square feet of offices in two towers now under construction at the World Trade Center site. Those are scheduled for completion in 2013.
“The amount of space that’s potentially going to come to the market will increase availabilities and put pressure on pricing,” said Kenneth McCarthy, Cushman’s head of New York- area research. “It will be quite awhile before it can be absorbed.”
Lower Manhattan, dominated by financial firms, withstood the commercial property slump better than any other U.S. business district, with more than 90 percent of offices occupied at the end of last year even as the city lost about 352,000 jobs. Now open space is rising faster than demand, as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. moves into its new downtown building, American International Group Inc. relocates its headquarters, and Bank of America Corp. shifts operations to its new tower in Midtown.
Lehman Move
Downtown New York’s success defied the most dire predictions after Sept. 11, 2001, that financial companies would flee. Within weeks of the World Trade Center’s destruction, executives of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., working out of makeshift offices at a Sheraton hotel, decided to leave the area rather than face a daily reminder of the terrorist attacks. They put their offices up for sale and sublease and paid $748 million for a 32-story building north in Midtown’s Times Square, according to a regulatory filing.
Goldman Sachs announced plans after 9/11 to move equity trading and research employees to Jersey City, New Jersey. The bank suspended plans for its new West Street headquarters in April 2005, citing uncertainty about the future of the nearby World Trade Center site. The city and state increased tax-exempt Liberty Bonds available to the company to $1.65 billion.
Even the New York Stock Exchange considered opening a second trading floor outside of downtown as a backup in case of another attack.
‘Unduly Reliant’
Downtown has “always been unduly reliant on the financial services sector,” said Robert Freedman, executive chairman of property broker FirstService Williams.
The office market outperformed other U.S. cities through the first years of the financial crisis, thanks to government subsidies, rents that were lower than Midtown and a 28 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index from the end of 2001 through 2007 that helped boost Wall Street profits.
Meanwhile, supply was restricted. Developer Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade, completed in 2006 north of Ground Zero, added just 1.7 million square feet of offices, compared with about 13 million square feet destroyed by the attacks.
The biggest addition of space now comes with Goldman Sachs’s move to 200 West St. The company will leave behind about 2 million square feet at downtown buildings including 85 Broad St. and 1 New York Plaza.
AIG, the global insurance company bailed out by the U.S. government in 2008, last year sold its headquarters at 70 Pine St. and 72 Wall St. to raise cash. It is moving employees into space Goldman Sachs is vacating at 180 Maiden Lane.
Merrill Lynch Space
Bank of America has yet to tell landlord Brookfield Properties Corp. what it plans to do with the offices it inherited at downtown’s World Financial Center when it bought Merrill Lynch & Co. last year. The Charlotte, North Carolina- based company has been moving employees into its new skyscraper in Midtown at 1 Bryant Park. The Merrill Lynch lease expires in 2013.
“What’s going to happen with those big blocks is that they’re going to sit on the market for a while, because to divide them up and make them smaller and more marketable involves a huge capital investment, and a lot of landlords can’t afford it,” said Ruth Colp-Haber, a partner at Wharton Property Advisors Inc., a New York-based brokerage that represents tenants.
A partnership led by New York developer YoungWoo & Associates LLC bought AIG’s buildings and has said it plans to convert some of the property into residential condominiums. Other areas will remain commercial.
End of 2011
“The question is, when is the demand going to come into the economy?” Haber said. “Most don’t see demand returning till the end of 2011. The real estate cycle moves slowly.”
Donald Trump, whose company owns a 1.1 million square-foot tower at 40 Wall St., pushed for new leases ahead of the Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and AIG vacancies. He put his son, Donald Trump Jr., in charge of the effort.
“My father a year ago saw what was going on in the market and he called me up, and I remember it clearly because it was Christmas Day,” Trump Jr. said in an interview. “He said ‘I want you to meet with me tomorrow and make 40 Wall part of your day-to-day life.’”
The Trumps leased 268,000 square feet of space in the building last year and expect to sign more tenants this year.
Ground Zero Building
In all, about 4.5 million square feet of downtown offices may be available by 2013, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
That’s also the year the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey expects to complete the first building under construction at Ground Zero. One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, is to be the Western Hemisphere’s tallest skyscraper, adding 2.6 million square feet to the market.
Silverstein also is developing a second tower at the site, which he aims to complete in 2013, that will have 1.8 million square feet of offices. A third building may be started if Silverstein raises $300 million in equity, signs tenants for about 20 percent of the space, and meets other financing goals.
“That’s a lot of space to fill,” said Robert Stella, principal of Boston-based brokerage CresaPartners, which represents Manhattan office tenants. “It’s going to have an impact.”
A little more than half the space currently under construction at the trade center site is spoken for by tenants, mostly government agencies. Federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s customs and border protection units plan to take about 1 million square feet, though they have yet to sign a lease. Chinese developer Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co. signed a contract for 190,000 square feet, making it the only private company agreeing to move to the 16-acre site.
4 World Trade
At Silverstein’s 4 World Trade Center, the Port Authority and the city each agreed in 2006 to rent 600,000 square feet, leaving another 600,000 square feet to be leased.
“We are not building for today’s market,” John “Janno” Lieber, head of Silverstein’s World Trade Center unit, told a New York State Senate panel in September. “These buildings will take four or five years to build and when they open, the city will be in a much stronger position. We need to be ready.”
Both Silverstein and Lieber declined repeated interview requests for this story, saying through spokesman Dara McQuillan they were busy with Port Authority negotiations on financing for reconstruction at the trade center site.
Port Authority spokesman Stephen Sigmund said the agency isn’t worried about demand for One World Trade Center.
‘World-Class’
“We’re not comparing and contrasting to other buildings downtown,” he said. “One World Trade Center is certainly going to be a world-class building that will be attractive to tenants, many tenants.”
Brookfield Properties, lower Manhattan’s biggest office landlord, is planning to renovate its World Financial Center to help it face new competition. The space that Bank of America vacated there includes trading floors of greater than 65,000 square feet, almost the size of a World Cup soccer field. Those floors could be among the hardest to rent in the city, said Colp-Haber of Wharton Property Advisors.
Brookfield in December presented a plan to brokers that would split the trading floors in two and serve each of the spaces with its own elevator, according to a property broker who attended the presentation. The broker declined to be identified because he wasn’t authorized by his employer to speak publicly.
‘Front-Burner Issue’
The renovation also would link the 25-year-old World Financial Center to a pedestrian passageway through the trade center site, allowing access to a new subway hub at Broadway and Fulton Street.
“This has got to be a front-burner issue, number one in Brookfield’s mind,” said Michael Knott, a real estate analyst for Newport Beach, California-based Green Street Advisors.
Melissa Coley, a Brookfield spokeswoman, declined to comment.
The space available downtown may appeal to companies seeking accommodations at a time when rents in midtown Manhattan are expected to rise, said Mark Shapses, senior managing director at Studley Inc., a New York based brokerage that specializes in finding space for tenants rather than representing landlords.
“It’s a place where people want to be,” he said. “You’ve got water views from a lot of the properties. Mass transit is probably better than anywhere else in the city. It’s true there’s going to be some increased vacancy, but they usually end up working these out through markets. It’ll take some time to lease up but I think it will lease up.”
Landlord Optimism
While construction at the 16-acre World Trade Center site scared off some property investors, Brookfield Chief Executive Officer Richard “Ric” Clark said on a conference call last month that the area’s new transportation and infrastructure will be complete by 2014.
“Most of our peers, we’ve heard them make comments that they’re not interested in lower Manhattan,” he said. “That’s fine with us.”
His optimism is shared by William Rudin, president of the family owned Rudin Management Co., which owns six lower Manhattan office buildings.
“If we continue to invest in lower Manhattan in terms of transportation and the memorial and all the things going on, at a certain price point, these spaces will find tenants,” Rudin said.
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