70 Hudson Yards highlights strength of Manhattan Class A Office
Here’s the number that should reorganize how you think about Manhattan office: 80 percent of all office space currently under construction in Manhattan is already leased. Not delivered. Not occupied. Leased — signed, papered, spoken for, years before anyone hangs a certificate of occupancy on the door.
If you’ve spent the last five years reading obituaries for the American office building, this piece is going to feel like a cold splash. Because the story on the ground in New York is no longer “will tenants come back.” It’s “is there anything left to rent.” And by the time you finish reading, you’ll understand exactly why the scarcity happened, who is capturing it, and what it means for how you underwrite trophy office over the next 36 months.
Let’s get into it.
📊 The Deal: 1.1 Million Feet, Ahead of Schedule, Half-Spoken-For
Related Companies is building 70 Hudson Yards — a 1.1-million-square-foot office tower, co-developed with Oxford Properties Group. It is the largest office project of its kind in New York City since the pandemic.
The status board, as of this week:
- Deloitte is the anchor tenant at roughly 900,000 square feet — an initial 807,000-square-foot lease signed earlier this year, later expanded by about 93,000 square feet
- That Deloitte commitment is valued at roughly $3 billion over its term
- Related is in negotiations on approximately half the remaining space
- Construction started about a year ago and the project is now a few months ahead of schedule
- Temporary certificate of occupancy expected as early as summer 2028
- Related and Oxford secured $1.6 billion in debt on the Hudson Yards position earlier this year
Read that Deloitte line again. A single tenant took roughly 82 percent of the building before the steel topped out. This is not a leasing campaign. This is a build-to-suit that happens to have a spec label on it.
“There’s a strong desire to be here and to grow within the campus. It just felt like a no-brainer to introduce another office tower to Hudson Yards.” — Stephen Winter, Related Companies
🔥 Why the Timing Looks Like Genius (It’s Mostly Supply Math)
Great timing in real estate is usually just supply discipline wearing a nice suit. Here’s the arithmetic behind it.
Hudson Yards availability fell to 4.5 percent in the second quarter, according to Colliers. Four and a half. In a market that spent half a decade being described as structurally impaired. Meanwhile, Park Avenue vacancy for Class A and B buildings is hovering at record lows.
So a tenant with a 2029 expiration and a growth plan walks into the market today and finds… almost nothing. Not “nothing cheap.” Nothing at all in the size and quality band they need.
That’s the whole ballgame. Development stopped in 2020. Financing got expensive. Construction costs went vertical. Nobody broke ground on speculative trophy office for years. And demand didn’t die — it concentrated. Every flight-to-quality decision funneled the same tenants into the same shrinking pool of buildings.
70 Hudson Yards is one of only a handful of new Manhattan office developments slated to deliver over the next several years. Scarcity isn’t a marketing angle here. It’s the physical reality of the pipeline.
⏰ The New Leasing Clock: Sign Four Years Early or Lose the Space
The most operationally useful takeaway in this story isn’t about Related at all. It’s about how tenant behavior has changed.
Look at the comps:
- Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — 916,000 SF at Extell Development’s 570 Fifth Avenue, a tower completing a few months after Related’s
- Starr (insurance) and McDermott Will & Schulte — major commitments at BXP’s 343 Madison Avenue, a ground-up project expected to deliver in 2029
- L’Oréal — a 484,000 SF renewal at Related’s 10 Hudson Yards
- BlackRock — a 194,000 SF expansion at 50 Hudson Yards
- Jump Trading — a new 99,000 SF lease at 50 Hudson Yards
Notice the pattern: the largest, most credit-worthy tenants in the city are committing to buildings that do not exist yet, sometimes three or four years out.
“If you want that type of top quality space, you need to make two-, three-, four-, five-year in advance commitments. Otherwise, that space will be leased by another tenant.” — Benjamin Bass, JLL
For anyone running a corporate real estate function: your planning horizon just doubled. A lease expiration in 2030 is a today problem. If you’re starting your search 18 months out — the old playbook — you are arriving to an empty shelf and negotiating from zero leverage.
💰 Rents Have Left the Old Map Behind
Here’s where the scarcity shows up in dollars.
“That part of town has well eclipsed the $200 a foot range and in some scenarios we’re hearing maybe eclipsing $300 a foot. So it is the absolute upper echelon of market rent.” — Benjamin Bass, JLL
Three hundred dollars a foot in Hudson Yards. A neighborhood that was, within recent memory, described as a speculative bet on a rail yard.
And the demand isn’t coming from one sector. Brokers describe law firms, tech companies, consulting firms and financial services tenants all hunting the same blocks. That breadth matters — it means the bid isn’t one industry’s balance sheet cycle. It’s a broad repricing of what elite space is worth when there isn’t enough of it.
CBRE’s Ryan Alexander described the psychology bluntly:
“All these hedge funds, private equity guys go visit their competitors or colleagues or friends, and they see their workplace, and they’re like ‘We need to upgrade,’ and especially if they’re competing for talent. It almost feels like there’s a frenzy right now to lock in this trophy space.”
Talent competition is the transmission mechanism. Office isn’t overhead anymore in these decisions — it’s recruiting infrastructure. Deloitte’s own logic, per Bass, was that the firm “were really focused on having the right platform to recruit and retain talent.”
When a cost center becomes a talent weapon, price sensitivity collapses. That’s how you get to $300.
🧭 What Operators Should Actually Do With This
Strip away the headline and here’s the working intelligence:
- Underwrite the pipeline, not the sentiment. National office vacancy narratives are useless in a submarket at 4.5 percent availability. Geography and quality tier are doing all the work.
- The barbell is real and widening. Trophy new-construction is at record rents. Commodity Class B in weak locations is a different asset class entirely — treat them as such in your models.
- Network effects compound. As Related’s Andrew Cantor put it: “In any industry in New York, if a company’s thinking about where they’re going to locate, they can see that there are leaders in that industry and peers that are already here. It’s proven and tested, and each time a new tenant comes, it’s just adding further to the network effects.” Clustering is a durable value driver, not a soft one.
- Delivery risk cuts both ways now. Being a few months ahead of schedule, as 70 Hudson Yards is, is a genuine competitive edge when tenants are racing expirations.
- Watch the 2028–2029 delivery window. 70 Hudson Yards, 570 Fifth, and 343 Madison land in roughly the same span. That’s the moment to test whether pricing power holds or the pre-leasing simply pulled demand forward.
🎯 The Bottom Line
Related and Oxford started digging when the consensus said office was dead. Twelve months later they’re ahead of schedule, roughly 82 percent pre-leased to a single anchor, negotiating on half the balance, and sitting in a submarket with 4.5 percent availability and rents flirting with $300 a foot.
The lesson isn’t “office is back.” It’s narrower and more useful than that: when supply stops for five years and demand merely relocates, the few people still building own the market.
Hudson Yards was once the risky bet. Today it’s competing head-to-head with Park Avenue — and winning tenants that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
If you have a Manhattan lease expiring in 2029 or 2030, your search starts now — not in 2028. Pull your expiration schedule this week, map it against the delivery calendar for the handful of towers actually coming online, and tell me what you find. What are you seeing in your submarket — real scarcity, or a trophy-tier mirage? 👇
