by Daniel Geiger
With news that the Related Companies has reached advanced negotiations to have the apparel company Coach anchor a new office tower on the West Side rail yards, Brookfield Properties, which has its own competing site just a block east, appears to be ramping up its own leasing efforts.
Cushman & Wakefield announced yesterday that a company leasing team led by two former CEOs at the firm, Bruce Mosler and Arthur Mirante, has been named as agents for the over five million s/f office and mixed use complex that Brookfield is planning to build at the location, which sits along 9th Avenue.
Like the West Side rail yards, Brookfield’s development parcel floats over working train tracks beneath that are used by the Long Island Rail Road and hence requires a deck to be built to support the towers that will be constructed above, work that the company says it has begun to undertake.
Mosler and Mirante partnered to form a high powered brokerage team at Cushman & Wakefield earlier this year. The two have since won a number of agency assignments, including reponsibilities for landlord Charles Cohen’s multimillion s/f New York and California office portfolio.
“The site is in the heart of Manhattan’s most vibrant neighborhood,” Mosler said in a statement issued by C&W. “We look forward to working closely with Brookfield and securing top-quality tenants for the state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly, efficient office and mixed-use space that will be Manhattan West.”
Brookfield’s site is located on 9th Avenue between 31st and 33rd Street. The company, which is one of the city’s largest commercial landlords, says it plans to erect four towers on the parcel, a pair of two million s/f office skyscrapers and a one million s/f office tower. A fourth building will also be built that C&W says will most likely be a mixed use property, potentially with a hotel and residential and retail space. The development will also feature 1.5 acres of public space. The architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP will design the project.
C&W will have a full complement of service professionals staff the leasing assignment according to the company’s release. One of the company’s top leasing executives, Josh Kuriloff, will join Mosler and Mirante as a lead on the account and Michael Rochford, a specialist expert in arranging lease structures and complex financial transactions is also a team member. James Young, a C&W executive in the company’s London office and Arsh Chaudhry, who is in the firm’s Singapore branch, will also be on the leasing team, a signal that C&W likely plans to flex its global reach to try to attract foreign tenants to the project as well.
