Big Money Manhattan Office Rent Isn't Cool Anymore

The Plaza District — essentially 42nd Street to basically Central Park South, from Third Avenue to Seventh Avenue — is officially Not Cool and also Highly Expensive and so therefore is Highly Vacant, because Bros Don’t Want Their Offices there. “The people who come to our buildings, they use words like ‘dude’ and ‘totally.’ They pound you, they don’t shake your hand. And right now, those are the ones making the space decisions,” is how the president of Trinity Real Estate, Jason Pizer, put it. Sure thing, brah! The dudes want to be closer to the L train. JK, they want to be down by The Startups. Um, also, they don’t want to pay $80 a square foot in rent; they’d rather move down fifteen blocks and pay $45. That’s not dumb in the slightest! WHERE IS OUR NANNY MICHAEL BLOOMBERG. Rough times, and so it’s a good moment to get some rent concessions. Midtown South has a vacancy rate of just 6%; now the Plaza District’s vacancy rate is over 12%. And so Jared Kushner’s beautiful 666 Fifth Ave has 500,000 square feet available. That’s 1/3rd of the whole building: it has 1.5 million of office space. That pesky building, it’s always something.