The quirky online media outlet, BuzzFeed, will do two times as much reporting when it moves into a two-year sublease from Tiffany for the entire 8th floor of 57,691 square feet at 200 Fifth Ave.
BuzzFeed now occupies roughly 24,000 square feet on a few floors of Olmstead Properties’ 54 W. 21st St., just around the corner in Midtown South, where the current asking rent for the one small space listed on CoStar is $49 a square foot.
The site has had tremendous expansion and growth fueled by 25 million unique page views each month that barrage visitors with photos of alleged Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s kitten, politics 20-which-ways, 17 ads that suck you in and 1,936 stories — that, like “Seinfeld,” are about nothing.
BuzzFeed ideally wanted to stay in the neighborhood or be on one floor and still have flexibility, sources said.
The social and news site was represented by Steven Marvin of Olmstead, who has worked with it since it leased its first 3,500 square feet at Olmstead’s 113 Spring St., through its move and several expansions at West 21st St.
“To lock up a long lease for a growing tech company is difficult,” Marvin said.
“It’s an active submarket with a limited supply available,” added Greg Taubin of Studley, who represented Tiffany. “We leased the 8th floor — the last available floor in 200 Fifth — knowing that we would immediately sublease it for two years and use it for future growth.”
Tiffany now shines in a little more than 400,000 square feet on the 9th through 14th floors at L&L Holding’s magnificent 200 Fifth. Grey Group occupies 2 through 6 and part of 7, while IMG Worldwide has the other half of the 7th floor.
But despite the limited supply, there are also just a handful of tenants that could lease a raw floor of that size for such a short term. The 8th floor hit the market in January, and Post colleague Steve Cuozzo noted then the asking rent was $80 a square foot.
The deal includes Tiffany building out the floor to its own standards with an eye on bumping BuzzFeed in the fall of 2015. “We catch our breath first,” said Marvin, declining to speculate on BuzzFeed’s future 14 steps.
BuzzFeed, led by former Huffington Post founders Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti along with John Johnson and former Politico editor Ben Smith, did not return 13 calls or e-mails for comment.
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The prestigious Most Ingenious Deal of the Year Awards were presented last night to brokers from Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, Cushman & Wakefield and The Singer & Bassuk Organization by the Real Estate Board of New York at its Commercial Sales Brokers Committees’ 69th annual reception at the 101 Club.
The first-place Henry Hart Rice Award was brought home by Newmark’s Barry M. Gosin, Brian S. Waterman and Romel Canete for their negotiations on behalf of Morgan Stanley to remain at One New York Plaza with a new, 1.153 million square-foot lease. The initial lease runs through Dec. 31, 2029, and has options through 2049, providing the financial firm with a flexible long-term home and owner Brookfield Properties with a stable property.
C&W’s Helen Hwang and Nat Rockett won the second-place Robert T. Lawrence Award for the two-stage sale of the luxury apartment building at 88 Leonard St. that included debt and mezzanine loans for a final deed price of $207,350,000.
The third-place Edward S. Gordon Award was presented to Scott A. Singer and Jeffrey C. Moroch of Singer & Bassuk for obtaining $35 million in construction and project loans for the Muss Organization to develop a condo building at 50 Oceana Drive West, in Brighton Beach, that closed right after Superstorm Sandy flooded some of the area.
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Rising Midtown South asking rents are now bumping a nonprofit to 733 Third Ave.
The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America, which has been located at 386 Park Ave. South since at least 1993, will move this fall to 14,508 square feet on part of the 5th floor at 733 Third Ave.
The Durst Organization building had an asking rent of $48 per foot while asking rents at 386 Park Ave. South owned by William Macklowe and Principal Financial are now in the $50 to $60 range
Michael Liss and Ross Zimbalist of CBRE represented the nonprofit in the deal.
“The deal brings the building to 100 percent leased,” said Brandl Frey who represented the Durst Organization in-house.