Brown Harris Stevens to Open New Office at 100 Fifth Avenue

Brown Harris Stevens is opening a new office near Union Square.

The residential brokerage signed a 20,000-square-foot office lease at Clarion Partners’ 100-104 Fifth Avenue, the landlord said. BHS will occupy the property’s recently renovated second floor.

A BHS spokesperson said some agents at the firm’s nearby 831 Broadway office in Greenwich Village will move to the new location at 100 Fifth Avenue. The brokerage will also keep its Flatiron District office a few blocks north at 130 Fifth Avenue.

It’s a popular stretch of real estate for the city’s top residential brokerages. Compass’ global headquarters, currently up for sublease, is at 90 Fifth Avenue, and many of its Downtown agents are based out of an office at 111 Fifth Avenue. Douglas Elliman’s Jonathan Stein team, which decamped from BHS last summer, is also based out of an office at 111 Fifth Avenue.

BHS has 12 locations across Manhattan, according to its website, plus six offices in Brooklyn, three in Queens and one in the Bronx.

The Kaufman Organization’s Michael Kaufman and Grant Greenspan represented Clarion in the lease at 100 Fifth Avenue. CBRE’s Paul Amrich and Alexander Golod represented BHS. The asking rent was not disclosed.

Other notable tenants at 100-104 Fifth Avenue include Adobe Systems, Timberland, Firstmark Capital and Red Ventures. Clarion purchased the two-building, 270,000-square-foot property in 2013 for $230 million from the Kaufman Organization and Invesco.

The lease comes about a month after Clarion sold two Williamsburg apartment buildings at 139 North 10th Street and 44 Berry Street to MetLife for $68 million.

Manhattan’s office market is still struggling to gain traction in the wake of the pandemic. Office leasing in the borough fell 43 percent year over year in the fourth quarter, with tenants taking just 4.9 million square feet in the final three months of 2022, the lowest quarterly total since early 2021, according to Colliers. The borough’s office availability rate increased for the first time in a year, rising 0.5 percent from the third quarter