LEED-EB

Beacon Capital's 1211 Avenue of the Americas (on Sixth Avenue between West 47th and 48th Streets) recently earned LEED-EB Silver certification from USGBC. The 45-story, two million-square-foot tower is the largest building that has been certified to date under the LEED for Existing Buildings rating system (it's unclear to us whether the project sought certification under LEED-EB Version 2.0 or Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance- we'll clarify in the comments if possible). Specific green features incorporated into the retrofit include efficient and reduced-content mercury lighting, low-flow plumbing fixtures, and new glazing that boosts the amount of daylight that reaches the tower's interiors. 1211 Avenue of the Americas earned BOMA's "Best Operating Office Building" award in 2008 for buildings larger than one million square feet; current tenants include the New York Post, Fox News Channel, and the Fox Business Network.

Last Friday, I gave a presentation at the Albanese Organization’s LEED Platinum hopeful Visionaire condominium project in Battery Park City to an audience of mostly real estate brokers. After presenting the CoStar and RICS studies (both of which we have reviewed in detail over at GRELJ), I put up two slides that I had converted from articles here at gbNYC setting forth the top fifty leasing transactions in Manhattan for 2008 and 2007. If you remember, we used the lists prepared by CoStar and plucked out leases that were finalized in LEED-certified, LEED-registered, or Energy Star-certified buildings during the course of each year. I noted to the audience on Friday that although such data is purely anecdotal, it does suggest the importance for brokers to understand the purview of third-party rating systems, including some of the risk management issues which I identified later on in the presentation.

The CoStar Group’s list of the top 50 Manhattan office leases (by square footage) that were finalized in 2008 appears in this week’s issue of Crain’s (though it isn’t available online). By our count, 7 of these 50 leases were inked for space in green office buildings. Importantly, the top two leases overall were in green buildings (1515 Broadway and 375 Hudson Street, respectively). We’ve written about a number of these buildings before, and present each lease below along with links to pertinent posts at gbNYC. We also set forth the tower’s third-party certification status (if any), tenant, landlord, and total square footage of the deal.

SL Green has started a $160 million capital improvement program at 1515 Broadway- home to MTV’s Times Square studios- which will upgrade the tower’s HVAC, lighting, and other building systems in pursuit a LEED-EB Silver rating from USGBC. Designed by architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, the renovation will also include the installation of a 42-foot high extension to the 54-story building’s street-level curtain wall, where pedestrians can peer into the MTV space and access the lobby of the Minskoff Theater. Steve Cuozzo quotes SL Green leasing chief Steve Durels as stating that the firm’s “goal is to give [the building] more street presence and more drama, especially as you look at its lower part.”