Empire State Realty Trust signed Foot Locker to a 34,200-square-foot lease to retain the apparel retailer’s flagship location at 112 West 34th Street in Midtown, the real estate investment trust announced Wednesday.
Foot Locker will consolidate from three floors at the location to a new configuration consisting of a portion of the ground floor and the entire second floor, ESRT executives said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday. The transaction follows the REIT’s recent 11,334-square-foot lease with Sephora in the same building.
Fred Posniak of ESRT, as well as a Cushman & Wakefield team of Joanne Podell and Ian Lerner, represented the REIT. Rob Martin of JLL represented Foot Locker.
The Foot Locker transaction was one of 60 leases representing more than 418,000 square feet of space signed by the REIT in the first quarter.
ESRT secured 21 new Manhattan office leases totaling almost 265,000 square feet in the first three months of the year, with its 7.4 million-square-foot Manhattan office portfolio almost 89 percent leased at the end of the quarter.
Notable office leases signed in the period include a 10-year, 78,000-square-foot lease with infrastructure solutions firm HNTB, a 27,000-square-foot lease with Media General and a 21,000-square-foot lease with software vendor Workday – all at the REIT’s flagship Empire State Building.
The company also signed financial services firm OnDeck Capital to an expanded, 79,000-square-foot lease at 1400 Broadway that takes OnDeck’s total space in the building to more than 117,000 square feet.
Including the Foot Locker and Sephora deals, five new retail leases constituting more than 50,000 square feet were signed in the first quarter, taking Empire State’s 727,000-square-foot retail portfolio up to almost 93 percent leased.
ESRT will continue to take advantage of “built-in growth” in its existing portfolio rather than relying on additional acquisitions “given the prices” in today’s market, company chair and CEO Anthony Malkin said Wednesday.