by Daniel Geiger
Deals are lining up at 150 East 52nd Street. Since taking over the agency work at the building in recent weeks, a team from the real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle says that it already has two leases in the works and expects more on the way.
The 300,000 s/f building is owned by the landlord David Tawfik, who hired the JLL team, which is headed by company executives Scott Panzer, Howard Hersch and Jeff Fischer, to help fill about 50,000 s/f of tenant rollover that is expected to take place over the next year.
Hersch said that he couldn’t yet go into details about the deals because neither has closed but said that the leases were for space on two floors, one a unit with an existing office installation left over from a previous tenant and the other a pre-built space constructed recently by the landlord.
Space on several floors at 150 East 52nd Street is available and Hersch says that the JLL team plans to do pre-built offices for many of the availabilities. With most floors in the property about 8,000 s/f or less, the JLL team has taken an interesting strategy at the property, creating a variety of smaller spaces for tenants to choose from. By offering a finely tuned array of sizes for users to choose from, the team is hoping to appeal to an often overlooked area of the market; smaller users for whom the difference of even just a few hundred s/f can determine whether a space will be an appropriate fit.
“Flexibility is what we’re trying to offer here, we have office units that are 3,000 s/f, 3,300 s/f, 2,900 s/f,” Hersch said. “It’s not typical that a smaller user can come to a building and choose from a lineup of offices where the difference in size is only a few hundred s/f. We’ve gotten a lot of interest already because for many tenants, even a difference of 500 s/f can mean whether an office is too big or small for them.”
Hersch said that the two deals the team has arranged total about 15,000 s/f. Panzer, Hersch and Fischer will now focus on leasing the remaining 35,000 s/f of availability at the property.
“We’ve got great pre-built offices that we think are going to attract small users,” Hersch said.
