Park Avenue boom lifts Midtown office market: Never give up on NYC

Marking a Midtown office-market milestone, State Bank of India leased nearly 42,000 square feet on three floors of 425 Park Ave.— bringing the tower to 100% full.It’s a triumph for developer L&L Holdings, which with its financial partners spent over $1 billion to develop the tower at East 55th Street.

Commercial Observer first reported the lease.More important,  ever since construction started six years ago, the Norman Foster-designed tower was closely watched as a barometer of the high-priced, new-construction market.Rents at 425 Park have topped $200 per square foot.“Park Avenue has been on fire for 24 months,” said CBRE global brokerage chairman Stephen B.

Siegel, who wasn’t involved in the Bank of India deal which was negotiated by Cushman & Wakefield.“Anything available gets leased even though rents are rising,” he said.But the surge isn’t confined to Park Avenue.Sources told The Post that a pending lease at 590 Madison Ave., which is losing former anchor tenant IBM to SL Green’s One Madison at East 23rd Street, will restore the 57th Street tower to over 90% occupancy.

The building’s owner, an Ohio pension fund, has put it up for sale at $1.1 billion — a test of the investment-sale market which has yet to catch up with the leasing boom.. Overall Manhattan office leasing went over the moon in January and February, according to new data from CBRE.Some 5.13 million square feet of leases, up 49% over the same period in 2024, marked the strongest start to a year since ancient-seeming 2014.The momentum shows no sign of slowing.

This month, Amazon gobbled up nearly 200,000 square feet at 237 Park Ave.,  its third major expansion in Manhattan since November.While analysts unfamiliar with the extent to which  Manhattan differs from the rest of the country   fret over “work-from-home,” the actual real estate market tells a different story.While some older downtown properties are still in trouble, most premier Midtown buildings...