WNET, the public television network, is close to a nearly 100,000 square foot deal to relocate from its longtime home at 450 West 33rd Street to Worldwide Plaza according to sources.
“We are considering a couple of spaces; no lease has been signed,” Kellie Castruita Specter, WNET’s senior director of communications wrote in an email.
A number of real estate executives familiar with WNET’s search said that said that a lease for two floors in Worldwide Plaza was imminent.
The network, which operates the local stations Thirteen and WLIW21, recently completed a deal to sublease the roughly 166,000 square feet of space it occupies at 450 West 33rd Street to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
At the same time, WNET has been scanning the market for a new home.
In an article in the New York Observer last October, the network’s broker Ira Shuman, an executive at the tenant representation firm Studley, said that WNET was looking for less space in part because it had reduced its staff during the economic downturn.
Leaving 450 West 33rd Street, rather than just subleasing a portion of its space there and remaining place, appeared to be preferable according to Shuman in that article because WNET wanted a chance to upgrade its space and improve its technology in a move.
Worldwide Plaza, located at 825 Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Street, has large vacancies that have attracted attention from a number of tenants in the market. In recent months, Peter Duncan, chief executive of the real estate investment firm that bought the tower last year, George Comfort & Sons, said that the amount of tenants that have looked at the space has been more than enough to fill the vacant 700,000 square foot block of vacancy in the base of the 1.8 million square foot tower.
Still deals have been slow to materialize due to the downturn in leasing activity and the fact that there have been relative bargains in more prestigious areas of midtown like Park Avenue. The deal with WNET appears to be a sign that things may finally be picking up at the Eighth Avenue tower.
The medical website WebMD signed a deal to take 50,000 square feet in the building in May, a deal first reported by Real Estate Weekly.
Sources say that another large transaction may in the works, the law firm WilmerHale is said to be potentially considering a move to Worldwide Plaza from 399 Park Avenue in what would be an over 200,000 square foot deal.