A CBRE leasing team led by company executives Brad Gerla, Howard Fiddle and Matthew Bergey has been hired to lease the Meatpacking District office building 414 West 14th Street.
The Carlyle Group, in partnership with the real estate investor Jack Sitt, acquired the six-story property in 2007, along with the neighboring building 416-418 West 14th Street, for $70 million from the Icon Group according to written reports at that time.
The partnership eventually combined the two buildings in order to widen 414 West 14th Street’s floors. It then significantly renovated the newly expanded property, installing a new lobby, elevators and HVAC system while preserving components that convey the building’s Meatpacking character, such as exposed brick walls and high ceilings.
As the office market dipped into a slowdown last year, tenants for 414 West 14th Street, as with a lot of other Manhattan spaces, appeared hard to come by.
The building is situated near the center of the Meatpacking District, one of Manhattan’s chicest neighborhoods for fashion and nightlife. In recent years the area has also become a desirable location for commercial office tenants.
But because of its popularity, its upscale flare and its dearth of office space, rents don’t come cheap. The building’s asking price is around $70 per square foot, putting it in the company of corporate office space in midtown, the city’s priciest office district, at a time when tenants have sought to take advantage of bargains in the market.
Of course actual deals at 414 West 14th Street may work out cheaper because landlords have had to provide incentives and other concessions that work in the economic favor of tenants in order to get leases signed amid the slowdown.
Concurrent with the city’s improving rental market, so too has activity appeared to pick up at 414 West 14th Street. In recent months, the law firm Purrington Moody Weil LLP signed on for the building’s fourth floor, a roughly 9,100 square foot space. The building’s agents say that interest for the remainder of the roughly 40,000 square feet of office space in the property has been strong.
“We’re getting a lot of interesting, creative tenants who fit right in with the neighborhood and value being in that location,” Gerla said. “Almost all of the floors have outdoor terrace space, it’s a really unique place.”
Gerla has worked with the Carlyle Group before. He is a key figure on a CBRE agency team that has led a successful leasing campaign at 14 Wall Street, another Manhattan office building owned by Carlyle.
414 West 14th Street’s retail, a roughly 11,000 square foot space on the ground floor and basement level has already been partially filled. Earlier this year the jeans retailer Levis, committed to about 3,000 square feet of the space. Andrew Goldberg, a retail specialist at CBRE, is the agent handling the remainder of the space.
Other brokers at CBRE involved in leasing 414 West 14 Street’s office space are Matthew Chmielecki, Evan Haskell, and Reggie Wills.