GlobeSt.com EXCLUSIVE: Grubb & Ellis Completes Major Leasing Assignment

NEW YORK CITY-FTI Consulting, a general business consulting firm, signed on the dotted line for a 17-year sublease of 93,000 sf at 3 Times Square completing a leasing assignment Instanet handed to Grubb & Ellis 15 months ago. Other available space in the site was taken up by EYE Tech, a pharmaceutical firm that signed on for two floors, and Quad Graphics, which took one for its printing business. The Bank of Montreal contributed to the sublease effort by taking a partial floor. This is proving to be a banner year for Grubb & Ellis in New York as by June the firm has doubled its business over the same time frame last year.

Lewis Cowan, G&E managing director, tells GlobeSt.com that he worked on these transactions for the Instanet space with Merrill Roth, vice chairman and team leader, Howard Rosen, executive managing director, John Cannon, senior managing director, and Timothy Ditchman, associate. “We were coming out of the blocks in March of 2003 when the New York market was in a depressed state.”

The team mounted an aggressive marketing effort that included targeted e-mails, direct contact and mailings to attract potential tenants to the site. “We created interest and worked on a media campaign. We generated buzz and pushed the proper buttons to get the site on everybody’s radar screen.” He believes that effort was why the spots leased up to a variety of unique business concerns. Though the core deals differ, the space was advertised at $45 per sf. “These are not household names. They recognized that it’s a quality building and we made the sublease user friendly.”

Dirk Hrobsky, vice president of Trammell Crow Co. NYC represented FTI, which is expanding from 26,000 sf at 622 Third Ave. “Clearly FTI Consulting’s business growth was the catalyst for this project of finding an alternative that scaled with their current business growth and anticipated future needs,” says Hrobsky.

The Grubb & Ellis team is still marketing Instanet space around the country and in Lower Manhattan including 20,000 sf of office space and some retail at 50 Broadway and a retail location at 61 Broadway.