One World Trade Center is expected to start welcoming its first tenants by the end of 2013. Condé Nast is famously the largest one to have signed up already (it will be a total of 1.1 million square feet of leased space); roughly 5,000 employees of the company should move into the building by 2013. The tower is supposed to be completed shortly after. The media company is a fantastic addition to the commercial mix of the Financial District which is becoming a little less financial and a little more diverse. This should benefit rents as well since Condé Nast is paying $60 per square foot leased versus the average $47 for a class A building in Downtown NYC in the third quarter 2012 (data from Colliers International).
A $250 million upgrade and expansion of the retail portion of the World Financial Center (next door to the World Trade Center) is expected to be completed by 2013. The project will add 177,000 square feet of revamped retail space back to the market. That’s enough for more than three dozen higher-end stores and a 25,000-square-foot gourmet food marketplace as well as up to six restaurants spread over 40,000 square feet. There will also be a glass pavilion along West Street at the street level, as well as underground passageways connecting the center to both the planned World Trade Center and Fulton Street transit hubs.

The opening of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in September has already generated increasing commercial real estate prices in the area. But as deals negotiated in 2012 start to close and new retail and office tenants begin to move into the area, the impact on the neighboring commercial market is expected to be even greater in 2013. For retailers, the demand will come from “the realization that 18,000 people are going to be here 250 nights a year” with money to spend, a local real estate player commented.

One57 luxury condominium will start delivering units to gazzilionaire buyers. Closings are expected to start in the summer 2013. It will be interesting to witness the real hard data about this project which was also the site of the crane collapse during hurricane Sandy. Prices will be high, but how high it remains to be seen. Personally it is hard to think that a steel and glass structure, the standard of these days, could come close to the more polished, high-end materials (i.e. limestone) and design employed nearby at the most luxurious condos in NYC: 15 Central Park West and The Plaza. You never know, marketing can do wonders. The finer palates will most likely find their meal of choice at the last two properties.

Manhattan apartment rents
According to appraisal firm Miller Samuel in 2006 the median apartment rent hit a record of $3,265. In 2013 the firm expects the number to be easily surpassed. The City keeps adding job, 92,600 in the 12 months ending September. And while new rental development has been more active in the outer boroughs, in Manhattan, only 2,596 units are estimated to have come available in 2012, according to Citi Habitats, the brokerage that handles the highest number of rental transactions. That’s the lowest total in the seven years that Citi Habitats has been tracking rental development. Rental construction peaked in 2009, when 3,966 units came online, while 3,607 were added in 2011. The reduced supply will likely push the rents even higher in 2013.