Cushman & Wakefield

The Cushman & Wakefield Global Retail Market Report released on Wednesday showed that the average retail rent for space along Fifth Avenue had jumped 23 percent annually in June 2008 to $1,850 a square foot per year. That made that stretch of Manhattan the world's most expensive retail corridor.

But there's also Madison Avenue and East 57th Street, the No. 2 and No. 3 most expensive retail corridors, respectively, in North America. The average per foot annually for Madison was $1,200; and for East 57th, $900. (The next closest in North America is Beverly Hills' Rodeo Drive at $670.)

Madison and East 57th's rents, however, were rather static, staying identical in June to the averages 12 months earlier.

Yesterday, CB Richard Ellis declared Fifth Avenue the world's most expensive stretch of retail based on the rents merchants have to pay. Today, it's Cushman & Wakefield's turn.

From that release: "New York’s Fifth Avenue is once again the world’s most expensive shopping street where retailers can now expect to pay rents of $1,850 per square foot per annum, an increase of 23 percent on 2007."

Fifth Avenue shares the Top 5 with streets in Hong Kong, Paris, Milan and Dublin.  read more »

There will be no drunken holiday carousing on the tab of New York City's biggest commercial brokerages this year: CB Richard Ellis and Cushman & Wakefield have both canceled their Christmas parties.

To be precise, Cushman & Wakefield didn't even bother planning one this year. CBRE did, and then had to hastily backtrack once the economy took a dive. In place of free eggnog and an opportunity to embarrass yourself in front of your colleagues, CBRE has graciously given all of its employees a half-day off.  read more »

It's bad out there for a broker. But, as Real Estate Weekly's Dan Geiger points out, bad times offer opportunities for the enterprising. Just look at Mary Ann Tighe, now chief executive of CB Richard Ellis' New York operations:

The late 80s was also a breakout time for Mary Ann Tighe ... In 1989, Tighe was part of a leasing team that put Random House in 425,000 square feet of space at 825 Third Avenue. In 1991, when the economy was in its last serious recession, she was key in arranging a 770,000 square foot lease taken by the electronics giant Sony at 550 Madison Avenue, what subsequently became known as the Sony Building. It was the largest deal in the entire country that year according to Tighe.

 read more »

Stylish and poorly financed Brooklynites, rejoice! Swedish retailer H&M has officially signed a 15-year lease at Al Laboz’s 497 Fulton Street, in the Fulton Mall.

The sizable, 29,600-square-foot store, between Hoyt and Bridge streets, will be H&M’s first street location in the outer borough, and Brooklyn’s second location (the other is in the Kings Plaza mall). “H&M’s commitment is a testament to Downtown Brooklyn’s resurgence,” Mr. Laboz, who’s also chairman of the Fulton Street Mall Improvement Association, said in a statement.

Cushman & Wakefield’s Robert Gibson, Thomas Citron and Molly Beal represented H&M in the transaction.

Sadly, thanks to a planned reconstruction of the building, H&M won’t open its doors until the end of 2010.

drubinstein@observer.com

In an apparent effort to raise cash, the struggling iStar Financial has put its $224 million Drake Hotel site mortgage on the block, according to a knowledgeable source.

“They’re a mortgage REIT and they need cash,” said the source. “The development is not going anywhere today. It’s in default. It’s not paying interest currently.”

The development site in question is the plot bounded by 56th and 57th streets and Park Avenue, once home to the Drake Hotel. Macklowe Properties has long had plans to erect some sort of tower there—reports bounce back and forth between residential and office tower plans. Either way, the project looks increasingly unlikely to materialize.  read more »

More troubling news for landlords across the nation!

Cushman & Wakefield is reporting that in 30 central business districts nationwide, office vacancy rates, by the end of the third quarter, rose to 10.6 percent, up from 10.2 percent at the beginning of the second quarter. Meanwhile, office leasing activity dropped 13.6 percent.

We're in solid tenants'-market territory, folks!

The good news, at least for us New Yorkers, is that we have the second lowest vacancy rate in the nation, at 7.4 percent, up 0.3 percent from the prior quarter. Boston, meanwhile, has the lowest vacancy rate, at 7 percent.  read more »

The self-immolating spectacle of Wall Street has cast a paralytic spell over Manhattan’s commercial brokerages. Buildings don’t trade. Leases don’t close. Real estate professionals take extended vacations. Only a few brokers have resisted the spell. They are this year’s power brokers.

The contingent of eight selected this year is by no means all inclusive. It is, however, representative. It includes three brokers who, at the start of 2008, were extraordinarily well placed to survive the storm and used their contacts and reputation to rise above the turmoil—Eastdil’s Doug Harmon, and CB Richard Ellis’ Paul Amrich and Richard Hodos. All three work at the top of the market and have continued to do so, the spectacular economic meltdown only mildly throwing them off their game.  read more »

For perhaps the first time, commercial brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield predicted unequivocably that Manhattan office rents would drop, in its just released second quarter investment sales report.

Among the report's sobering conclusions:

■ Year-over-year sales activity through 2Q08 down 59 percent at $13.8 billion

■ Foreign investors have replaced previous high leverage buyers

■ Manhattan vacancy increased 1 percent to 7.1 percent in the last quarter, yet rising rents reached a record high of $71.59 a square foot, up 21 percent from a year ago

■ As financial sector layoffs materialize, rents will decrease

■ Development pipeline limited due to a lack of construction financing

For the full report, see attached.

The commercial real estate market must really be wretched. How else to explain Cushman & Wakefield’s midyear breakfast on Tuesday morning when, in Michael’s glassed-in patio, a couple of ballsy brokers erupted with skepticism, calling into question their bosses’ own stats—to those bosses’ faces. In front of the press.

“If I were sitting in the media looking at the stats, I’d think that someone was drinking the Kool-Aid,” said Joshua Kuriloff, a broker at the firm.

Mr. Kuriloff even uttered the R-word (“recession”) to describe the economy—a term that’s verboten among most real estate types, who favor limper nouns like “contraction,” “slowdown” and “downturn.  read more »

Over $13.8 billion in Manhattan investment sales closed or went under contract in the first six months of 2008, a precipitous drop from the $34 billion in sales volume done in the first six months last year. Nearly half of this 2008 volume came via foreign investors.

The numbers come from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield's latest quarterly Manhattan market report, released this morning during a breakfast at Midtown power eatery Michael's.

The dismal investment sales numbers--which cover building, property and portfolio sales--aren't a surprise, really. Nor is the increase in the amount of foreign investment (it accounted for maybe 12 to 15 percent of investment sales in previous six-month periods).  read more »

Brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield will relocate its headquarters to an enormous new space on Sixth Avenue.

C&W, which calls itself the “largest privately held commercial real estate services firm,” signed a 15-year lease for a whopping 156,282 square feet, the entire seventh floor and portions of the eighth and ninth floors at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, between 51st and 52nd streets. The 43-story Emery Roth & Sons-designed building is owned by Vornado Realty Trust.  read more »

Forget your modern (and soul-crushing) office space aesthetic. Who needs cubicles and florescent lighting, when you could have a working fireplace, a rooftop terrace, and views of Central Park?

If that’s your bag, and you’ve got $1.3 million in that bag to spare, have we got the space for you.  read more »

The real estate wonks at Cushman & Wakefield have said it, so it must be true: the market is contracting.

Egad(!) is right.

C&W's "First Quarter 2008 New York Capital Markets Group Manhattan Market Overview" makes the following sobering conclusions:  read more »

It's become a truism that Brooklyn commercial rents are a bargain when compared to Manhattan's. That truism is now, if you will, even truer.

A Cushman & Wakefield first-quarter survey of 82 commercial buildings in Brooklyn revealed that, between the first quarters of 2005 and 2008, the average rent per square foot in Brooklyn rose 14 percent to $31.44, while in Downtown Manhattan, the average rose an astronomical 62 percent to $50.28.

The difference between rents in the two markets was far less pronounced back in the halcyon days of 2005, when Brooklyn rents averaged $27.51 a foot, while Downtown Manhattan rents averaged $31.03.  read more »

It’s a balls-out move, but this Wednesday CB Richard Ellis will take on its archrival Cushman & Wakefield by hosting a first-quarter analysis luncheon for media folks the day after Cushman & Wakefield hosts its own first-quarter breakfast for the same media folks.

Call it a schmooze-fight.  read more »

Time to ready the oxygen tanks: Commercial brokers are planning to race up 86 floors of the Empire State Building.

Come Feb. 5, an Empire State Building spokeswoman tells us that the city’s biggest brokerages will square off with each other as part of the building’s annual “Run-Up,” with Jones Lang LaSalle, Cushman & Wakefield, CB Richard Ellis, Studley and Newmark Knight Frank each planning to send at least one team of five runners (team names include the “Sub-Primers” and “Victoria’s Secret”).  read more »

Office-leasing activity in Manhattan dropped in 2007, suggesting a slowdown in a once furiously fast-paced market. In the fourth quarter of 2007, companies leased slightly more than 5 million square feet of office space, less than in each of the previous three quarters, according to a report out today from brokerage Cushman & Wakfield. Leasing dropped 12.8 percent for the year from 2006.  read more »

For all the chatter about foreign money inundating Manhattan, when it comes to buying and selling massive properties like skyscrapers and apartment portfolios, Americans still lead the way. You go, America!

According to a new report from brokerage heavyweight Cushman & Wakefield, only 12 percent of the investment-sales transactions closed or put under contract in the first three quarters of 2007 have been to foreign buyers alone. It’s been a banner, booming year for investment-sales in Manhattan—the $42.5 billion in property traded through Sept. 30 already dwarfs the amount traded in all of 2006, which itself was a record year.

Other takeaways from the report after the jump.  read more »

The Manhattan office market left the summer behind as healthy as ever, with vacancy rates low and rents rising to record-high averages. Still, one has to wonder: With the credit market crises continuing, was the third quarter of 2007 a swan song?

The overall office rent for Manhattan was $62.91 a square foot in the third quarter, which ended Sunday, according to a new report from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. That's an increase of more than $3 over the second-quarter average and a nearly $10 increase over the first quarter's average. In midtown, where the the choicest office space abounds, rents hit a record high of $74.47 a foot; they averaged nearly $50 a foot a year ago.

But the borough's vacancy rates perhaps foreshadow rockier times to come. The vacancy rate rose in midtown and midtown south from the second quarter to the third, and in Manhattan overall. Still, the increases were mild; in midtown, for instance, it rose from 5.3 percent to 5.6 percent. And all the vacancy rates were lower than they were a year ago.

The Observer's John Koblin will have more on the office market numbers in tomorrow's paper.

A Cushman & Wakefield report released today said that the market will be just fine despite the credit problems.

Anything to worry about with investment sales? Nah, nothing will affect it unless lots of people lose jobs. With leasing? No, it's fine too unless there's a "pronounced and prolonged" downturn in financial services, which obviously drives the real estate market these days.

The report is for you to judge, but C&W doesn't hint about any possibility of dropping office rents (however slight), even though that's becoming a more popular line of thinking among more real estate people.

But as optimistic as the report is, there's a limit to it. There is no indication the sales market or leasing side will continue to surge at the breakneck pace it's traveled over the last 12 months. Still, the report says values, particularly in investment sales, should "remain stable."

One of the industry's hot young talents, Paul Milunec, is leaving GVA Williams for Cushman & Wakefield.

The 28-year-old Mr. Milunec is joining Tara Stacom's high-profile team, where he'll be a director. Ms. Stacom has spent the better balance of the year rebuilding her team, after a devastating hit last year when Paul Amrich left for CB Richard Ellis. Earlier this year, Ms. Stacom added ex-Vornado broker David Green and now she brings in Mr. Milunec, who actually got his start at C&W in the emerging brokers program.

In an email today, Mr. Milunec made the announcement:

I am delighted to announce that after six wonderful years at GVA Williams I have decided to join Tara Stacom's team at Cushman & Wakefield. I look forward to working with Tara, David Green and the rest of her team.

All year, brokers have been whispering about Mr. Milunec, knowing that his increasing profile and popularity in the industry would eventually be too big for GVA to hold onto him. It's Cushman that had the foresight to claim him first.

Mr. Milunec is currently the treasurer for the Young Men's and Women's Real Estate Assocation, where David Green is a governor. Let this be a lesson to all those aspiring brokers: network!

“The real estate market in New York these days is like the weather,” Cushman & Wakefield’s Joe Harbert said this morning. “Hot!”

The chief operating officer for the New York region certainly had the statistics to back up that statement when the firm released its midyear report for the Manhattan commercial real estate market this morning.  read more »

Cushman & Wakefield has purchased the majority ownership position in the real estate investment company Sonnenblick-Goldman. The price was not disclosed.

Under the agreement, Cushman & Wakefield will become the majority owner in the company, while Sonnenblick principals will stay aboard. Sonnenblick-Goldman was involved in $7.5 billion of transactions last year, including arranging the $390 million financing for 485 Lexington Avenue.

This is Cushman & Wakefield's biggest move since the IFIL group purchased the company last year for $563 million. Last December, IFIL chief Carlo Sant'Albano said that the Italians would "bring something to the table in assisting the team at Cushman & Wakefield in growing their business." This is the Italians first step in proving that. 

Full release after the jump.  read more »

“Today is a happy day for me,” said Bill Clinton after lunchtime this afternoon at the Hilton in midtown. He was speaking to clients and brokers for the commercial brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield.

The reason he’s happy is because tonight he’ll be joining Michael Bloomberg in a joint effort to convince major cities all around the world to become a little bit greener.

Mr. Clinton praised Mayor Bloomberg’s greening plan for the city and discussed its most charged component, the $8 fee that it could cost to drive into midtown during rush hours.  read more »