Durst Just About Done Leasing Up Condé Nast's Former Times Square Tower
The Durst Organization has found a tenant for the last two full floors available at its Times Square office building One Five One.
Chicago Trading Co. has taken 68K SF in the building, previously known as 4 Times Square, across the 36th and 37th floors. The deal is for 15 years, Durst said in a statement. CTC is leaving 1120 Sixth Ave. for the space, which had an asking rent of $112 per SF, the New York Post reported. The building is now 97% leased, the landlord said.
The deal is the office leasing equivalent of reaching a peak after a valley. Durst had to backfill the departures of law firm Skadden Arps and media giant Condé Nast, which went to Hudson Yards and the Financial District, respectively, and left behind them an empty skyscraper Durst has spent years methodically re-leasing.
BMO Capital Markets, the investment banking subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal, leased 215K SF at the building at 151 West 42nd St. in 2019, and in 2020, video-sharing app TikTok followed, becoming one of the first companies to lock down a major office deal in the pandemic when it took 232K SF for its U.S. headquarters.
New York City’s office leasing market is starting to show some signs of recovery, though it is still well behind the pre-pandemic levels. Just under 6M SF were leased during the second quarter of the year, according to CBRE data — a 5% jump from the quarter before. Leasing in the borough was still down 4% from the five-year quarterly average.
“By no means do I think the world’s back to perfect in New York. … We still have a ways to go until we get back to what we would call a pre-pandemic level," CBRE Vice Chairman Paul Amrich told Bisnow last week. "But every month we're seeing better signs of leasing."
In the deal at One Five One, CBRE’s Ben Friedland, Jason Pollen and Hannah Gerard represented the tenant, along with Mark Keebler and Brad Serot from CBRE’s Chicago office. Durst was represented in-house by Tom Bow, Rocco Romeo and Tanya Grimaldo.
