You’d never know it from some recent bad publicity, but Related Companies’ Hudson Yards is on a roll. If you’re surprised to hear that, the proof is in the enduring and growing strength of the office towers.
For all its glamorous shops, restaurants and performing arts programs, Hudson Yards is first and foremost an office complex, with four huge towers comprising 8.6 million square feet. Although privately-held Related, led by chairman Stephen M. Ross, is shy about sharing data, several brokers helped us to estimate that all the expensive office space is about 95% leased or sold.
At the newest tower, 50 Hudson Yards, which opens later this year, a bunch of large deals recently closed that totaled a whopping 285,000 square feet in a sluggish market.
The new space commitments bring the tower to around 84% leased. The most impressive is a new lease of 95,000 square feet for Vista Equity Partners. Asking rents for the remaining available space are in the $175-$240-per-square-foot range, brokers said.
The complex’s largest tenants and commercial condo owners include Meta, Warner Bros., BlackRock, Discovery, Tapestry, Wells Fargo, L’Oreal and Point 72. Most employees are at their desks, too. Although Related doesn’t say so for the record, sources tell us that physical office occupancy at the site is up to about 60% compared with the Manhattan average between 40% and 43%.
It’s too easy to lose track of Hudson Yards’ phenomenal and ongoing success given negative publicity over weakness in the retail mall, where Related is converting Neiman Marcus’ former seven floors to offices, and the closing to the public of the tourist-magnet Vessel following four suicide leaps.
Meanwhile, in the un-Related world of Ross’s NFL Miami Dolphins ownership, his alleged tampering with Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady cost the Dolphins two top draft picks and got Ross banned from his own stadium for several months.
But they’re all sideshows to the main event: a commercial boom at a sunken rail yard site that was an eyesore and waste of precious Manhattan land for nearly 100 years.