The quiz results are in: BuzzFeed needed less office space.
The digital media company signed a lease for 42,000 square feet with Jed Walentas’ Two Trees Management at 50 West 23rd Street in the Flatiron District, the Commercial Observer reported. Buzzfeed will occupy the sixth floor and part of the fifth floor.
The move represents a significant downsizing for BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed previously occupied 110,000 square feet at 224 Park Avenue South before subletting the space to Monday.com in 2022. It then moved to slightly less space at 229 West 43rd Street, 107,000 square feet in all.
Now, the company is more than halving its headquarters.
In 2023, BuzzFeed closed its news division and enacted several rounds of layoffs. Following that, it sold Complex for $108.6 million (which it bought for about $300 million) and, most recently, recently laid off 22 percent of the newsroom at Huffington Post.
The duration of the multiyear lease was not disclosed. Asking rents at 50 West 23rd Street range from $68 to $70 per square foot.
Two Trees’ Alyssa Zahler represented the landlord in-house. A CBRE team of Christopher Mansfield, Jason Frazier and Jesse de la Rama represented BuzzFeed.
Other tenants at Two Trees’ 13-story, 341,000-square-foot building include grocery delivery platform Instacart, marketing agency BMF and software company Grovo. In 2022, consumer review site Trustpilot took 34,000 square feet on a seven-year lease.
Two Trees purchased the building in 2010 for $129.5 million. It then embarked on $25 million in renovations, upgrading the lobby, installing a new heating and ventilation system and adding an 11,000-square-foot roof deck.
Manhattan leasing volume dropped about 13 percent month over month in February after an unusually strong January, coming in at 3.2 million square feet, according to a monthly Colliers report. Leasing velocity, however, grew by 38 percent year over year, and demand was 19 percent above the ten-year monthly average.
— Holden Walter-Warner
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