Beauty company Coty Inc has signed a new lease for 317,716 square feet (29,517 square meters) in New York City's Empire State Building, adding two floors to the four it already occupied in the iconic skyscraper.
The new lease, which expires in 2030, will call for Coty to add 118,792 square feet of office space to the 198,924 square feet it occupies in one of the world's most famous landmarks, said Anthony Malkin, president of Malkin Holdings, which controls the building.
Terms of the lease were not disclosed. Yearly asking rent per square foot at the Empire State Building runs from the high $40s to the lows $60s.
This is the second expansion Coty has undertaken in the building since it signed its first lease in 2008. Coty has offered to buy Avon Products Inc and been rejected.
The new lease will allow Coty, which currently occupies floors 14 through 17, to expand to the 18th and 19th floors.
The space is for Coty's existing operations.
"They have chosen to make a corporate campus headquarters in the building," Malkin said, attributing some of the demand to the building's ongoing energy-efficiency retrofit.
Coty is headquartered at Two Park Avenue in New York City. Kevin Janeczko, a spokesman for the company, declined to comment on the lease or on the future of other locations.
With Coty's expansion, floors three through 19, which total over 1 million square feet, now are occupied by three tenants - Coty, the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and LF USA, the U.S. unit of Hong Kong-based consumer goods design and distribution company Li & Fung Ltd - replacing 193 smaller tenants.
"We emptied out and demolished 193 small tenants - showrooms, doctors, dentists, lawyers, travel agencies, employment agencies - and leased to three absolutely top-credit-quality tenants," Malkin said. "That's indicative of what we are doing throughout the building."
Malkin has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to form a real estate investment trust, Empire State Realty Trust Inc, and take it public.
The Empire State Building would be the centerpiece of the 18-property trust, which would trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "ESB".
Brokers from Newmark Knight Frank represented the Empire State Building in the deal.
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