(Bloomberg) — A new lease at lower Manhattan’s One World Trade Center bumped occupancy at the skyscraper up to 95%.
An existing tenant, German data processing firm Celonis, expanded its space at the tower, taking all 40,763 square feet (3,787 square meters) on the 70th floor, according to a statement Monday by landlords Durst Organization and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Occupancy at the property, which has 3.1 million square feet of space, was at 93% in February 2020 and had dipped to roughly 90% during the pandemic as tenants with employers working remotely let their leases expire.
“It’s been a long run for us — 11 years now — to reach this milestone,” said Eric Engelhardt, Durst’s head of leasing at the 104-story skyscraper. “We did a lot here that a lot of people felt we couldn’t do.”
One World Trade, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 1,776 feet (541 meters), opened in 2014 at the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The largest tenant, Conde Nast, agreed to take about a million square feet in 2011.
Conde Nast’s parent, Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., withheld rent during the pandemic as it tried to renegotiate or exit the lease. The rent is now up to date and some of the space has been subleased, according to Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Durst.
Advance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The financial district was hit hard by Covid-19, as skyscrapers emptied out and major tenants from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to S&P Global looked to give up big blocks of offices. While leasing has ticked up in the area since then, new space is continuing to reach the market, pushing up overall vacancies.
Celonis, with headquarters in Munich and New York, had a funding round of $1 billion last year, bringing its total valuation to more than $11 billion.
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