BY DANIEL GEIGER

Earlier this year, approximately 150,000 square feet opened at the Midtown office tower 399 Park Avenue when the law firm WilmerHale, a tenant in the building, left to relocate to Lower Manhattan.

The property, a 1.75-million-square-foot skyscraper owned by the large commercial owner Boston Properties, is home to the global headquarters of Citibank and is widely considered one of the finest office buildings along Park Avenue, an exclusive and highly desirable corridor in Midtown.

Boston Properties had found takers for the building even in the worst of times, filling the few hundred thousand square feet that suddenly became available in 2008 when Lehman Brothers, a former tenant, collapsed and sparked the financial crisis.

Fast-forward to 2012, a market several years removed from the depths of the recession, and this time around, Boston Properties wasn’t taking any chances. According to the leasing agent at the property, Peter Turchin, an executive at the real estate services firm CBRE, Boston Properties quickly switched to the leasing strategy du jour: finding takers for the space one floor at a time rather than waiting for one big user to fill a large portion or all of the space.

To read the full story, click here.

BY STEPHEN KLEEGE

The East Side market got a much-needed shot in the arm earlier this year when Citigroup Inc. decided to remain in its 500,000-square-foot space at 601 Lexington Avenue.

“Citi renewed its commitment,” said Cynthia Wasserberger, a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle who was among the brokers representing landlord Boston Properties. The banking conglomerate, which had signaled during the downturn that it might divest itself of the offices, instead “chose to let other space lapse,” Ms. Wasserberger added.

The transaction helped stabilize a submarket where the vacancy rate jumped 2.3 percent to 10.2 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, according to Cushman & Wakefield analysts.

In line with Midtown as a whole, year-to-date leasing activity fell 34 percent in the East Side office market, which stretches from Lexington Avenue east between East 47th and East 72nd streets.

To read the full story, click here.

BY STEPHEN KLEEGE

The Madison/Fifth Avenue submarket has the most expensive office space in Manhattan and the highest vacancy rate in Midtown, as the owners of its trophy buildings hold out for top-dollar rents.

“The reality is that for tenants who want to have [a] premier office environment with premier views of the city, there’s no such thing as pre-recession or post recession,” said Scott Panzer, vice chairman of Jones Lang LaSalle, who has the task of signing up tenants for one of the biggest vacancies in the city, at 9 West 57th Street. The owner of that building, Sheldon Solow, is looking to get rents as high at $200 a square foot, more than twice the average for the district and more than three times that for all of Manhattan.

The 50-story tower, known for its concave-sloping black glass façades and the fat red numeral 9 on the 57th Street sidewalk, is about one-third vacant, according to JLL’s website. Available spaces range from 3,210 to 247,400 square feet.

The vacancy stems from Bank of America’s move from the 1.4-million-square-foot building to 1 Bryant Park, which opened in 2010. Cushman & Wakefield estimates that 9 West 57th Street accounted for 2.8 percent out of the 15.4 percent vacancy rate in the submarket in the third quarter and added almost $15 to the area’s average asking rent, which was $95.01.

To read the full story, click here.

BY STEPHEN KLEEGE

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to spur development in the Grand Central area, Manhattan’s biggest office submarket with almost 44 million square feet of inventory, is winning mixed praise from real estate executives, who say New York may be at risk of losing its preeminence over such business hubs as London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai.

“I think Mayor Bloomberg has this right,” said Stuart Eisenkraft, vice chairman at CBRE and co-chairman of the firm’s global cities practice. “It’s sort of a no-brainer the global economy is here and it’s here to stay.” Developers in Asia, he said, “don’t have the challenge of site logistics or governance that prevents them from building magnificent Class A buildings.”

The new Midtown East district would loosen restrictions in a 78-block area between Fifth and Second Avenues and East 57th and East 39th Streets, where buildings are more than 70 years old on average and have low ceilings and interior columns that are undesirable to Class A tenants, the Department of City Planning said in an overview. Most of the new development would be focused on the area around Grand Central Terminal, because it has the best transportation access and largest concentration of aging office stock, according to the department’s Midtown East study.

Some urban planners, community boards and City Council members have expressed concern that the addition of towers that may be taller than the 77-story Chrysler Building would worsen crowding, The New York Times reported.

To read the full story, click here.

BY STEPHEN KLEEGE

The Empire State Building is becoming a more exclusive address.

The tenant roster in the iconic 81-year-old skyscraper has been cut to 171 companies from more than 600 in 2006, before Malkin Holdings took over supervision of the property. The average rent has increased to $42.10 a square foot from about $26. The building, which is among the few notable commercial assets in Murray Hill, is approximately 20 percent vacant, partly because Malkin is keeping space off the market as it looks to assemble offices suited to larger users.

The building sits at the western edge of the Murray Hill submarket, an area that has benefited as technology and new-media demand spreads from Midtown South. That’s helped keep vacancies in Murray Hill at 4.5 percent. Average rents for the submarket as a whole are slightly higher than at the Empire State Building, at $45.22, Cushman & Wakefield’s third-quarter figures show.

To read the full story, click here.