In a summer leasing market a lot cooler than the temperature, Salesforce.com just signed for a cloud-busting expansion.
The San Francicso-based enterprise cloud-computing firm took 74,349 square feet at TIAA-CREF’s 685 Third Ave. — a mega-jump over the 16,350 square feet it currently has at 2 Grand Central Tower across the street.
The 10-year-lease at 685 Third was negotiated by Cushman & Wakefield’s Gus Field for Salesforce.com and CBRE Group’s Anthony Dattoma, Howard Fiddle, Zachary Freeman and Molly Concannon.
The asking rent was $60 a square foot. The deal was said to include an unspecified tenant-improvement cash allowance.
TIAA bought the then-vacant tower from Pfizer for $190 million two years ago. Freeman said the new landlord swiftly launched a capital-improvements program including a new lobby and elevators and soon, an upgrade of the adjacent plaza as well.
The improvements began drawing office tenants, which now total 226,000 square feet in the 626,000-square-foot address.
Freeman wouldn’t discuss the capital improvement cost but industry sources estimated it at more than $10 million.
Freeman said a crucial part of the new deal was that the owners “respected the tenant’s right to grow,” and that the lease includes significant expansion rights for Salesforce.com within the building.
Salesforce.com calls itself “the trusted leader in cloud computing and CRM [Customer Relationship Management].”
The company’s slogan is, “No hardware. No software. No headaches.”
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The Meatpacking District has almost no meatpackers left. Could the Diamond District be losing its diamond merchants?
The rise of Extell’s International Gem Tower appears to be a game-changer even before it opens next year, raising property values and altering the chemistry of the famed West 47th Street block between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
The three-level, 19,176-square-foot retail space at 15 W. 47th St. — known as The Exchange, one of the largest of the block’s multi-tenant jewelry marts — is up for grabs.
Only new landlord Joseph Chetrit isn’t looking for a new jewelry tenant — but for a bank.
The Exchange has a precious 75 feet of sidewalk frontage. Winick Realty broker Melinda Miller told us, “It’s being marketed to banks or financial institutions only because it’s the best use as there is only one bank servicing the Diamond District on 47th between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
“Extell’s new building also increases the demand for another bank,” she said. “The owners have taken note of the need.”
Chetrit’s plan has The Exchange’s 50-plus merchants scrambling. Although none has yet been evicted, they don’t have leases either — they’ve been month-to-month since their last ones expired in 2008.
Firenze Jewels owner Jeff Levin said, “We’ve been an anchor here for more than 25 years. What’s killing us is the uncertainty.”
Another long-time merchant in The Exchange said he hadn’t been able to get answers from managing agent Drummond & Hill, which didn’t return our call either.
The Gem Tower at 30 W. 47th is conceived as the new home of the global jewelry industry, where companies will buy rather than rent their space.
It’s a crystalline vision amidst weathered and often run-down brick facades, and sidewalks full of increasingly aggressive “We buy diamonds-gold” hawkers.
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OK, Brookfield — where’s that platform you promised you’d start building at your Manhattan West site?
CEO Ric Clark told us last February that work on the rail yard deck would start in the spring. All that stood in the way, he and company president Dennis Friedrich said, was nailing down fine points of an agreement with Amtrak, which controls the tracks in the yard 65 feet below street level at the five-acre site bounded by Ninth and Tenth avenues and West 31st and 33rd streets.
We gave it big play under the headline, “Manhattan West, On Deck.”
But work has yet to start on the deck, which is central to Brookfield’s plan for three large towers and a big retail component even though it isn’t necessary to support them.
The company declined to comment. But sources familiar with the situation said that, among other things, the new idea of using at least one of the three planned towers for residential rather than commercial — recently raised by Friedrich in an investors’ conference call — has caused Brookfield to “make sure everything’s aligned to accommodate that possibility.”
And, sources said, the Amtrak agreement still isn’t nailed down.
After first announcing its deck plan in 2006, Brookfield has several times told media including The Post it would start building it by various dates, but failed to meet any of the timetables.
Big dreams often take longer than first imagined, and Brookfield can afford to wait — but shouldn’t a giant, publicly traded company be a little more cautious with cheery forecasts it might not be able to meet?