BY DANIEL GEIGER

The area north of Madison Square Park has long been without an agreed-upon name and without a go-to tenant base.

Lately it’s being dubbed NoMad, and with this newfound recognition, it has become a draw for office tenants, especially those confounded by the boom in Midtown South, the greater neighborhood of which it is a part.

“There are a lot of tech companies and other tenants who are being pushed out of [prime] Midtown South [submarkets] right now because of the low vacancy rate and the high rents,” said Andy Roos, a leasing executive with Colliers International who owns and leases properties in the emerging area. “Now they’re starting to head north to NoMad.”

Mr. Roos said that tenants in the rug business and lingerie makers used to cluster in the area. High-end carpet sellers still occupy retail space along corridors such as lower Madison Avenue, but much of the office tenancy in the area is turning over to more lucrative takers.

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BY STEPHEN KLEEGE

In Chelsea these days, talk inevitably seems to come back to the High Line.

“It created a neighborhood where one didn’t exist,” said Christopher Albanese, principal at the Albanese Organization, after unveiling plans this month for a 10-story office building adjacent to the elevated oasis that cuts through the western end of the neighborhood.

Mr. Albanese said he got a taste of the potential for Class A office space near the park last year, when the company was able to lease the Chelsea Art Museum building to Hewlett Packard Co. within three months of putting it on the market. According to Cushman & Wakefield, there are only two Class A buildings in Chelsea, both fully occupied; the total vacancy rate in the district’s 83 office buildings is 3.9 percent.

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BY IAN THOMAS

Noho is finally turning into a swan.

Being seen as an attractive destination is a drastic change for a neighborhood that was described as the “ugly stepsister of Soho” in a Wall Street Journal article just two years ago. Likewise, many New Yorkers saw it as the small neighborhood that was looking for some way of differentiating itself from its sister to the south.

But the area might have just found what it’s been looking for with 51 Astor Place, the 430,000-square-foot granite-and-glass office tower now under construction. Once completed, the building will provide “infrastructure for companies that you can’t find in many other places in New York City—let alone this neighborhood,” said Paul Glickman of Jones Lang LaSalle, who is working as a leasing agent at 51 Astor, a development project spearheaded by Edward J. Minskoff Equities.

It’s all part of the big draw of the neighborhood, its proximity to young entrepreneurs, Mr. Glickman told The Commercial Observer.

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BY IAN THOMAS

If the Midtown South office market is hot, then Soho has been scorching.

The total vacancy rate for the third quarter of 2012 was just 3.1 percent, a 1.3 percentage point drop from last year, according to a quarterly report issued earlier this month by Cushman & Wakefield. With just 47 buildings and a little more than 4 million square feet of total inventory, available space added up to slightly more than 126,000 square feet, a decline of 27.8 percent from last year, analysts told The Commercial Observer.

“There’s just a lack of inventory across the board, which will just keep pushing rents north,” said Greg Taubin, executive managing director at Studley. He added that there is “continued demand from tech-related tenants seeking the look and feel of a collaborative environment.”

Total weighted average rental rates in the third quarter for the neighborhood were $49.03 per square foot, up 4.3 percent from last year, according to the C&W report.

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BY IAN THOMAS

The industrial vibe of Hudson Square has beckoned media and tech firms in recent years, including New York magazine, MTV and now the New York Genome Center.

Now, analysts predict that the next industry on the list for Trinity Church, the religious institution that controls much of the area’s property, will be fashion.

Trinity Real Estate brokers lured high-end fashion designer Thakoon Panichgul into a 12,000-square-foot space at 225 Varick Street while also signing leases with Tory Burch and 3.1 Phillip Lim in recent months.

Vacancy rates are still very low in Hudson Square, sitting at 8.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, according to data from Jones Lang LaSalle. However, nearby Greenwich Village could benefit from that, as it has a much larger amount of open space, to the tune of 12.9 percent, according to the same report.

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