In a spectacular holiday present for the World Trade Center and developer Larry Silverstein, media investment management giant GroupM has signed a 20-year lease for over a half-million square feet at 3 WTC, paving the way for the Richard Rogers-designed office and retail tower to rise to its full 80 stories.
GroupM will consolidate 2,400 employees into the new skyscraper from several Midtown locations — the latest, and one of the largest, migrations to downtown by a non-financial company.
GroupM is the parent of WPP Group media agencies including MEC, Maxus, MediaCom and Mindshare. The company follows on the heels of Condè Nast, which is moving to the Port Authority and Durst Organization’s 1 WTC.
Silverstein Properties and GroupM signed a nonbinding term sheet in July, as The Post first reported. The complex negotiation was said by jealous industry insiders to have bogged down and be unlikely to be completed until 2014 if at all – but they were wrong.
GroupM is taking 516,000 square feet in nine floors of the tower’s base. The skyscraper will have a total 2.5 million square feet of offices and 183,000 square feet of retail in the 6-story podium, which is now nearly finished.
The deal allows Silverstein to “move forward to complete the financing and construction of the tower, also known as 175 Greenwich St., according to a spokesman for the developer.
The project estimated to cost about $2 billion will be partly financed with $1.3 billion in low-interest Liberty Bonds. Silverstein still needs to obtain a loan for the rest. But although no start date has been announced yet for construction above the podium, he states with confidence the finished project will open in 2017.