The Far West Side has already drawn some of the world’s biggest financial and law firms. And now, it’s landed perhaps the biggest prize of them all: Amazon.
The e-commerce giant announced Thursday that it has signed a 360,000-square-foot, 15-year lease at Brookfield Property Partners’ 5 Manhattan West. It will serve as New York’s main location for Amazon Advertising, and jobs at the site will include software engineers, data analysts and economists.
Amazon will take all of the sixth and seventh floors of the 16-story, 1.8 million-square-foot Building On 10th Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets, as well as parts of the eighth and 10th floors. It will bring the building’s occupancy rate to 99 percent, with other notable tenants including JPMorgan Chase and Whole Foods, which is anchoring the building’s ground floor with 60,000 square feet of space.
Amazon’s expansion into 5 Manhattan West will create 2,000 new jobs with average annual earnings of $100,000, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office. The company was offered up to $20 million in tax credits through New York’s Excelsior Jobs Program to expand in the state, and it will invest $55 million to outfit its new space with energy-efficient standards.
Getting the deal done took an army of brokers and in-house professionals. JLL’s Derek Trulson, Josh Stuart, Bill Peters and Clay Nielsen represented Amazon, while Brookfield was represented in-house by Jeremiah Larkin, Duncan McCuaig and Alex Liscio, as well as by a Cushman & Wakefield team of Bruce Mosler, Josh Kuriloff, Rob Lowe, Ethan Silverstein and Matthias Li. The parties were negotiating since at least April.
5 Manhattan West is part of an eight-acre, six-building mixed use development that Brookfield is constructing on Manhattan’s West Side From Ninth Avenue to 10th Avenue and 31st Street to 33rd Street. It will feature roughly 6 million square feet of office space, residential space and a boutique hotel.
Amazon has set up multiple projects in New York State over the past five years, including investing $9 million into a fashion photography and videography studio in Brooklyn and setting up a 350,000-square-foot administrative office at 7 West 34th Street. The company is also planning to open its first distribution center in New York on Staten Island’s West Shore, an 855,000-square-foot facility that should create 2,250 jobs.
The Seattle-based company most recently shook up the business world by announcing that it would seek to open a second headquarters, which should represent a $5 billion investment. Although New York is expected to be in the running for this as well, Related Companies chairman Stephen Ross recently said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he “can’t see them really coming to New York, realistically” because of the city’s high cost of doing business.