BY AL BARBARINO

Ironically, it seems that Hurricane Sandy, while delivering a fierce blow to Lower Manhattan, has in fact helped the submarket to bounce back with something of a vengeance.

Overall new leasing increased 21 percent in the 12 months after Sandy compared to the previous 12 months, firms are migrating to Lower Manhattan (in many some cases into buildings that were affected by the storm), those displaced returned, and Verizon replaced a once all-copper network to fiber.

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BY GUS DELAPORTE

As average asking rent for Class B space in Midtown South reached $57.41 in the third quarter, the Downtown and Penn Station submarkets have experienced increased activity in Class B and C leasing, according to CompStak’s Third Quarter Effective Rent Report.

Effective rent in Midtown South increased $0.18 to $49.27 per square foot during the third quarter and tenants priced out of the submarket have been seeking alternatives elsewhere in the city, including Downtown, where overall office effective rent sits at $36.99 per square foot. Though that number is up $3.50 from the second quarter, the submarket still offers considerable savings over Midtown South. In a sign of the shift, ad agency Droga5 elected to swap 400 Lafayette for 120 Wall Street in a 91,442-square-foot deal.

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BY BILLY GRAY

TDC Development and the Rockefeller Group have finally filed work permits on their $850 million Flushing Commons project eight years after announcing the Queens development.

The partnership is seeking approval to modify part of a 5.5-acre parking lot in the Flushing neighborhood. That move will clear the way for the project’s first phase, which includes 160 residential units and 350,000 square feet of commercial and/or retail space.

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BY ROBERT KNAKAL

The recovery in New York City’s property sales market accelerated in the third quarter of 2013, but its dynamics have changed. As pricing for existing Manhattan properties has exploded, investors are stepping up the risk ladder, increasingly chasing yield in development and value-added properties as well as properties outside of Manhattan.

In Q3, there was approximately $8 billion of investment sales transactions. Annualizing the first three quarters of the year, we are on pace for about $30.2 billion in sales volume for the year, which would be a 26 percent decrease from the $41 billion that occurred last year. However, comparisons to last year can be misleading and must be put into perspective. Record sales volume, precipitated by the fear of increased capital gains taxes, led to a spectacular year in 2012 from a dollar-volume, as well as a number of properties sold, perspective. Thinking back to 2011, it was a year in which all participants in the New York real estate sales market were feeling great about how the market was performing. Relative to 2011, this year’s activity, year-to-date, is ahead of the 2011 pace by about 8 percent.

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BY RICHARD PERSICHETTI

How tight is Midtown South? A simple answer to that question is the market is very tight and considered to be below equilibrium.

With an availability rate of 8.7 percent and asking rents at historical highs for both Class A and Class B space, the market is in high demand. Digging into the numbers further shows that 35.25 percent of Midtown South buildings are fully leased. That percentage may not seem like much, but compare that to Downtown’s 25 percent and Midtown’s 23 percent, and you will see that Midtown South is pretty significantly outperforming the other markets.

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