Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
270 Park is no outlier: Big companies are buying enormous amounts of office space in Manhattan.
Driving the news: Google and Facebook now have over 3 million square feet of space each in the borough, while Amazon has almost 2 million square feet.
- Even Disney is building a 1.2 million square-foot headquarters building in New York. That's well over three times the size of Disney's official corporate headquarters in Burbank.
By the numbers: A high floor at 1 Vanderbilt — the tall tower in between the Chrysler and Empire State buildings — was recently rented at something very close to $322 per square foot, per the Real Deal.
What that means: A Canadian waste-management company is spending more than $3 million per year to rent an area roughly the size of two basketball courts.
The official appraised value of commercial real estate in New York City is now $301 billion, up almost 12% from the pandemic low, and off just 7.7% from the pre-pandemic peak.
The bottom line: Many companies are looking to shrink the amount of space they rent as their workforce transitions to a hybrid system with a lot of working from home.
- But there doesn't seem to be any shortage of other companies wanting to come in and take over that square footage.