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This Week's N.Y. Deal Sheet

The first week of June brought life to New York City's leasing market, with several big deals, all expansions, poised to give a lackluster second quarter of activity a major boost.

TOP LEASES

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Rendering of Brookfield's Manhattan West project on the Far West Side of Manhattan

JPMorgan Chase, in one of the largest office leases of the spring so far, signed a 305K SF expansion deal at Five Manhattan West in the Hudson Yards district. The lender now has a footprint of 428K SF in the building, which recently signed Whole Foods as a retail anchor. Rents in the 1.8M SF building, recently renovated for $300M, are above $90/SF, according to Brookfield Chairman Ric Clark.

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Business Insider was the second big-name tenant to sign a big-ticket lease in a Brookfield-owned building this week, inking a deal for 88K SF at One Liberty Plaza in the Financial District. The news website is moving from its 41K SF sublease in Flatiron at 150 Fifth Ave. Asking rent in the deal was $53/SF. BI was repped by JLL's Bill Peters, Derek Trulson and Mike Shenot, while Brookfield was repped by Newmark Knight Frank's David Falk and Peter Shimkin.

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Shaving startup Harry's, known for its podcast advertisements, has agreed to move its headquarters to a 60K SF space at One Hudson Square at 75 Varick St. in SoHo. NKF's Falk and Shimkin repped the landlord, Trinity REIT, while CBRE's Sacha Zarba, Freddie Fackelmayer, Christopher Mansfield and Adele Huang represented Harry’s. The four-year-old company, which owns its own factory in Germany, is moving from 161 Sixth Ave.

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Schrödinger, a software company with a name that alludes to a thought exercise involving the state of a cat in a box, is expanding its offices in Tower 45, a Kamber Management-owned office building at 120 West 45th St. Schrödinger is taking an additional 26K SF, bringing its total footprint to 63K SF. Avison Young's Mitti Liebersohn and Kamber's Steven Levy repped the landlord, while Cushman & Wakefield's Peter van Duyne repped the tenant.

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Volunteers of America's local chapter is relocating its offices, moving from the Upper West Side to 30K SF at 135 West 50th St. in Midtown. Cushman & Wakefield teams repped both sides: David Lebenstein and Debra Wollens repped the nonprofit tenant, and David L. Hoffman, Craig Evans and Whitnee Williams were among the brokers repping the landlord, UBS Realty.

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Law firm Ballard Spahr has agreed to move its New York City offices to Rudin Management Co.'s 1675 Broadway. Ballard Spahr signed a 10-year deal for the entire, 27K SF 19th floor in the 35-story, 850K SF tower. The law firm, repped by Cushman & Wakefield's Alan Wildes and Melissa Bazar, will move from its office at 919 Third Ave. Robert Steinman repped the Rudin family in-house in the deal, for which the asking rent was $75/SF.

TOP SALES

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The office building at 85 Broad St. in New York, owned by Ivanhoé Cambridge.

Ivanhoé Cambridge closed on its $652M acquisition of 85 Broad St., built as the headquarters for Goldman Sachs in 1980. The Canadian fund acquired the building from previous owners MetLife and Beacon Capital Partners, and secured a $360M CMBS loan as part of its financing package to acquire the property.

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Icon Realty Management, owned by Terrence Lowenberg and Todd Cohen, has sold its nine-story apartment building at 56 West 11th St. in Greenwich Village for $37.75M. An Italian investor acquired the property as part of a 1031 exchange, motivated to keep its capital in the U.S. The 36-unit, 27K SF building, built in 1912, sold for north of $1M/unit.

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4 Gramercy Park West, a six-unit condo building off Park Avenue South in the Flatiron district, sold for $23.1M to an anonymous company listed as 4 Desolation Row LLC. The seller, Chelsea Land Co., lists a Jacob Goldfield as managing member, according to city property records.

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Japanese firm Kobe Bussan, a little more than two years after purchasing it for $19M, has sold 439-444 West 54th St., which was once the site of a planned hotel from McSam Hotel Group. The buyer, a locally based member of an Asian real estate family, paid $23M for the development site in Hell's Kitchen and could build condos instead of a hotel.

Sales data courtesy of Reonomy.

TOP FINANCING DEALS

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A rendering of The XI condo project on Manhattan's West Side.

NYU Langone is planning a new medical center in Manhattan's Kips Bay, at 433 East 30th St., and it now has $600M with which to build it. The medical center secured a series of taxable bonds through Bank of New York Mellon to finance the 10-story building, planned to include a 365K SF research center. Renderings of the project have not yet been released.

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HFZ Capital Group has closed on three loans for a total of $595M to finance the construction of The Eleventh, its two-tower, Bjarke Ingels-designed project at 76th 11th St. Children's Investment Fund led the first round of the $1.25B in financing for the project along the High Line, and this round comes from Irish lender Talos Capital.

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Alexico Group, the developer of the vaunted 56 Leonard condos, has secured a $265M refinancing of the Mark Hotel at 1000 Madison Ave. on the Upper East Side. The loan, from JPMorgan Chase, replaces a $200M loan from TPG.

Financing data courtesy of Reonomy.