Tenants will receive $68 M. in damages.

The tenants of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village have finally settled their class action suit, winning $68.7 million in damages that will be awarded to tenants who were overcharged on their rent between January 2003 and December 2011 as a result of illegal rent deregulation.

The settlement means an end to the lengthy Roberts v. Tishman Speyer legal battle. Tishman Speyer defaulted on its loans in 2010 and the property is now owned by CW Capital Asset Management LLC. The damages, to be paid by CWCapital (on behalf of the
bondholders' trust) and former owner MetLife Inc, will be divided among 21,250 tenants in 4,300 units.

The settlement, pending final court approval that could come as early as April 2013, will mean that damages of some $10,000 will be awarded to each of the 4,300 units deemed to have been affected by overcharging. It also means that tenants' plans to buy the complex themselves in a bid to protect the buildings as a increasingly rare refuge for Manhattan's middle class might finally move forward.

Tenants sought $215 million in compensation for the rent overcharges, which is far more than the current award, but the plaintiff's attorneys say that the final agreement will bring the total recovery in the lawsuit to at least $146.8 million. In addition to compensating tenants for past rent overcharges, the agreement also includes savings in the form of future rents, which will be based on a formula that factors in market conditions and tenant turnover rates.

"We believe this settlement provides an extraordinary recovery for our clients and we couldn't be happier for them," said Ronald Aranoff of Bernstein Liebhard, one of the plaintiff's lead attorneys, in a statement.

The agreement also guarantees rent stabilization through 2020, when the complex's J-51 tax benefits expire, reinstating the benefit to a number of residents whose units had been erroneously deregulated. Tenants who signed market rate leases will be offered modified rents or their original rent grown by the yearly rent guidelines board increases.

The settlement comes after some 18 months of negotiations. The complex has been mired in drama ever since Tishman Speyer bought the complex for $5.4 billion in 2007 with plans to draw an upscale clientele in the market for luxury apartments.

CW Capital Partners took care to point out that they took over the complex almost four years after the suit was first filed.

“Since then we have worked hard to try to balance the interests of residents and bondholders, recognizing that our fiduciary responsibility to investors must respect the concerns of tenants who call Peter Cooper Village Stuyvesant Town home," wrote CW managing director Andrew MacArthur in a release.

The settlement deals with less than half of the complex's 11,229 units spread out across 56 buildings.

Rather than heralding the announcement, lifelong resident and council member Dan Garodnick issued a cautious statement.

But events have consequences, as Mr. Oxley would be the first to aver, and as the storm developed, one consequence was that local governments closed roads and public transportation. When The Observer spoke to him this morning, he was stuck at home in Monmouth County, N.J., emailing television producers about whether to phone in today’s interview, or just reschedule.

“It’s almost hilarious,” Mr. Oxley told us today. “But the beauty of extreme weather investing is that you don’t necessarily have to be in ahead of the event. You can play the opportunity as it unfolds.”

Mr. Oxley, a director of global credit research at MetLife, likened extreme weather investing to an explosion. The latter needs a fuel source, oxygen and an ignition. The former needs a weather event, a high concentration of commodities that can be affected and corresponding financial instrument.

Natural gas was a famous hurricane play when Katrina blasted the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Oxley told us. Refineries were damaged in the storm, diminishing gas supplies, increasing prices and causing the stocks of companies like Chesapeake Energy and Southwest Gas to rise.

More recently, Mr. Oxley bought shares of a fertilizer producer called CF Industries after meteorologists predicted last year’s dry winter would lead to a dry summer. Fertilizer prices soared and the stock rose. On the other side of the trade, Sanderson Farms, a chicken producer exposed to the fluctuations of feed prices, fell sharply as corn prices rose.

“If you’re really tuned into it, it’s almost shockingly easy,” he said. “Last year, we had a nice warm winter, and the price of natural gas took a nose dive. You might say to yourself, ‘That was really unusual. The price of natural gas is probably going to rally up again.’ That’s exactly what happened—it was almost like a gift.”

Mr. Oxley was trained as an engineer, and visited mining operations on six continents, gaining an appreciation for the concentration of certain commodities and vulnerabilities to supply disruptions. After making a career change to investing, he kept an eye out for opportunities along those lines.

During the snowy winter of 2010-‘11, Mr. Oxley was out shoveling his driveway in Monmouth County, N.J. when the idea struck him: “I guarantee the salt maker stocks are going up,” he said to himself. Then: “I have to write this book before someone else does.”

As for how to trade the Frankenstorm, Mr. Oxley suggested looking beyond storm surges along the Atlantic coast and to forecasts for snowfall in neighboring mountain regions. While oil refineries in the Delaware Bay could be affected by the storm, he said, the concentration isn’t great enough to make gas a slam-dunk play. But if early snow this year harkens a wetter winter, a company such as Compass Minerals that derives significant revenue from rock salt might be in line for increased profits.

Of course, that begged the question: With U.S. markets closed today in anticipation of the worsening storm, how can individual investors take a position?

“It’s not a bad thing,” Mr. Oxley told us. “You can wait and see how this thing develops.”

Only a few months had elapsed since the firm had signed on at the start of the year to take roughly 7,000 square feet on the fourth floor of the midtown office tower 444 Madison Avenue, and already it was clear to Wasserman’s executives that they had significantly miscalculated the company’s needs.

444 Madison Avenue.

Founded and headquartered in Los Angeles, the sports marketing and talent management firm had broken into the Manhattan market about as well as any company in its business could have hoped. And for Wasserman, success meant quick growth.

In recent years it was hired to help sell the naming rights to the new stadium in the Meadowlands built in partnership by New York’s two professional football teams, the Giants and Jets, what John Brody, a principal at Wasserman and head of its New York office said was one of the largest naming rights assignments ever in sports. That deal finally came to fruition over the summer when the insurance company MetLife reached an agreement to have its brand as the stadium moniker in a reputedly $400-plus million transaction that Wasserman helped arrange.

Meanwhile, relationships with two key New York clients of the firm, Pepsi Co. and American Express, were blossoming.

“It just worked out that there was a confluence of wins for us,” Mr. Brody said. “We had been working on the Jets and Giants stadium project since the shovels were in the ground but we redoubled our efforts in the months leading up to the deal to get it closed with MetLife.”

Even though Mr. Brody, a veteran of the New York market who worked for Major League Baseball as a marketing executive before joining Wasserman last year, may have had an inkling that the company’s business might thrive in the city, the rapidity of it seemed to take both him and the firm off guard.

Needing to add personnel, Wasserman found itself almost immediately bumping against the limits of its footprint. It couldn’t simply push out into more space on the fourth floor to resolve the problem either. Another tenant already occupied the floor’s remaining 12,000 square feet.

Wasserman sought to use its offices at 444 Madison Avenue as efficiently as it could. Stephanie Rudnick, a spokeswoman for the firm, said that it had even reduced the amount of space it dedicated to backroom server operations by using cloud computing services that allowed it to store its data offsite and keep more of the space for employees.

“Casey Wasserman is a huge advocate and early adopter of new technology,” Ms. Rudnick said, referring to the company’s founder and chief executive, who operates primarily out of the firm’s L.A. office.

Taking too much or too little space can cause a tricky situation for tenants. Most firms that anticipate growth commit to more than they need to accommodate expansion. But overestimating comes with its own risks. A tenant can be left with awkward scraps that are difficult to sublease if its strategy doesn’t go according to plan. On the flipside, as Wasserman was finding, too little space can threaten to stifle a firm’s business and force it into the often challenging task of tacking on additional room.

Because Wasserman’s deal was so freshly minted, the company couldn’t just wait for its lease to expire to allow it to troll the market for bigger options. Of course, the company could have subleased the space in its entirety and rented somewhere else, but that would likely have been a costly and inconvenient process. More than anything else, Mr. Brody said the firm wanted to stay put.

The asset at 444 Madison Avenue, situated on the corner of 49th Street, is ideally located for Wasserman’s business. Mr. Brody said that his old office at Major League Baseball and a number of other big league professional sports headquarters, like the NFL’s and the NHL’s, are just a stone’s throw from the property. Major television networks such as News Corporation, NBC and CBS are also close by in Rockefeller Center and on Sixth Avenue.

“We really loved the building because it was right in the midst of the hub of our business,” Mr. Brody said.

At first glance, however, the prospects for staying at 444 Madison Avenue seemed dim. Paul Amrich, a leasing executive with the firm CBRE who handles deals at 444 Madison Avenue for the property’s owners, had been busy since the beginning of the year marketing one of the only vacancies at the 42-story property, a block of floors on nine, 10 and 11.

Initially Mr. Amrich had hoped to lease the spaces in a contiguous deal to a single tenant. When Sinclair Li, a colleague of Mr. Amrich’s at CBRE and Wasserman’s broker, reached out to Mr. Amrich and the building’s landlord, Westbrook Partners, Wasserman was excited to learn that ownership would be receptive to the idea of its expansion.

“Originally we wanted to lease the floors together but we were open to changing that strategy,” said Mr. Amrich, who has overseen a number of successful leasing campaigns at other Madison Avenue buildings, such as 510 Madison and 660 Madison.

Mr. Amrich and his agency team at the property, comprising CBRE executives Patrice Meagher, Kerry Powers and Elie Gross, quickly drew up a deal with Wasserman to scrap its lease on four and have it take all of 10, a roughly 20,000-square-foot space. And just like that, Wasserman rejiggered its space in the building to nearly triple in size.

“We told ourselves carpe diem,” Mr. Brody said, seeming to hint that even though Wasserman clearly needed the extra room to grow, it nonetheless took a degree of confidence to trade up in size at a time when many firms are being cautious to see how the economy will pan out in 2012.

For Mr. Amrich, the lease with Wasserman didn’t deal any setbacks to his plans for filling 444 Madison Avenue’s other empty floors. As he negotiated with Wasserman in the months leading up to its recent closing on the 10th floor, he leased the ninth floor to FTN Financial.

Seeing the wisdom of keeping in close contact with other tenants already in the property to see if, like Wasserman, they too would be interested in growing, Mr. Amrich found another existing occupant in need of space. TD Bank, which had a retail location on 444 Madison Avenue’s ground floor, needed to relocate offices it had from another building in Midtown. Mr. Amrich struck a deal to place the bank on the entire 11th floor. The bank ended up wanting to import even more units into the building and in recent months Mr. Amrich leased TD the second floor as well in another 20,000-square-foot deal.
Now, Mr. Amrich says he has a deal on for the space that Wasserman is leaving behind. He said that it was too early to reveal who that tenant is because the lease is not yet signed, but he says it will be with a Fortune 500 company.

“The caliber of tenants at 444 Madison is something that we’ve worked to maintain at a high level and this deal, just like Wasserman, FTN and other tenants, is in keeping with that,” Mr. Amrich said.

Dan Geiger, Staff Writer, is reachable at dgeiger@observer.com

The ALICO sale closed today, bringing in $16.2 billion. That figure, coupled with the $20.51 billion brought in from the AIA IPO, results in a $36.71 billion capital raise. AIG president and CEO Robert H. Benmosche said in the announcement that the deals had raised enough cash to pay back the company's roughly $20 billion credit facility with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, one step among many in AIG's ongoing bid to return to the private sector.

AIG's announcement follows a determination last week by TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky that the Treasury Department had switched its accounting methods when projecting expected losses on the AIG bailout. The switcheroo had reduced the loss forecast by $40 billion, a wrinkle that some saw as a convenient minimization of taxpayer risk ahead of the midterm elections.

In any case, AIG looks ready to pay its credit card bill!

mtaylor [at] observer.com | @mbrookstaylor

"Say I'm buying a hammock for my backyard," he said Thursday morning on the 18^th floor of the MetLife building, minutes before he would give a talk on the Manhattan commercial real estate market's second quarter. "I think, what could go wrong? Screws could fall out, the netting could break. That's not so bad. This 50 percent off looks great."

He laughed wistfully. "I'm one of those people who's totally changed my buying habits in this economy," he said.

Like the speakers at Wednesday morning's Cushman & Wakefield market recap, the executives who spoke at Thursday's CBRE "Manhattan Market Research Media Breakfast" expressed confidence. But the CBRE officials were more cautious. We Acknowledge That Things Are Still Not Great, seemed to be the theme, But We Are Coping Extremely Well and Keeping Our Fingers Crossed. They were optimistic, but they qualified that optimism with ambivalent metaphors. A CBRE release, issued at the event, declares that the "leasing 'summer breeze'" is "gently lifting."

"I was asked not to use the words 'bouncing along the bottom,'" Mr. Van Buren said, using those words. He was addressing the reporters in the room. "Because you've all written them so many times."

Availability, to use Mr. Van Buren's term, is "stuck" at 14 percent. It's a small improvement over last year's 14.2 percent, but slightly worse than the first quarter's 13.9 percent. The actual vacancy is down only slightly, to 9.3 percent from last year's 9.4 percent. The average Manhattan asking rents aren't any rosier. While the current $47.61 a square foot is better than the previous quarter's $47.58, what's more important is that $47.61 is worse than last year's $53.35. "'Bouncing' is actually the right word," Mr. Van Buren said.

Relative to the country as a whole, New York City is doing well, CBRE officials said. Jim Costello, the CBRE director of investment strategy, compared the national job market to the market in New York as a way of indicating economic strength. "Mixed Signals with Office Jobs across U.S.," reads the headline of a slide, which comes directly before "Signals with New York Office Jobs not as Mixed" in his presentation. Mr. Costello's wording was cautious, with double negatives rather than outright positives, but his prediction for the coming years was anything but.

Barring a double dip, Mr. Costello said, the economy should be back to the pre-recession peak by 2013. And it'll keep on climbing.

"We actually think New York will lead the market," he said. "The national market, I mean."

Like the Cushman people, CBRE executive vice president Peter Turchin talked about the dominance of top-end office space in current commercial deals, which he called a "flight to quality." Since there's now only an $11 difference between the average asking rents of midtown's "top 20 percent of buildings" and buildings in the rest of Manhattan (compared to a $43 difference in the beginning of 2008), it's definitely a buyer's market.

The breakfast spread during the pre-lecture schmooze was nondescript and continental: pastries, fruit, bagels, cream cheese, coffee and orange juice. The cream cheese was flavored, an extravagance that perhaps indicated market optimism. Chatting before the official talk, though, Mr. Van Buren remained wary.

"People are concerned. Things have been good for the last three, four months, and now they're not good," he said, before quickly adding a qualifier. "They're mixed."

walden@observer.com

In the end, MetLife went with real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its then historic $5.4 billion offer, leaving the tenants dejected.

Now, as real estate values have plunged from their peaks—which happened to roughly coincide with the November 2006 sale—and buildings around the city are failing to fetch the rents that their quixotic, often leverage-happy buyers envisioned, another viewpoint of the Speyer victory, from the tenants’ perspective, might make more sense: as a stroke of good fortune.

“Considering that it’s being assessed as low as $2.1 billion,” said Alvin Doyle, president of the Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village Tenants Association, “yes, I’m glad we lost the bid.”

From the moment that MetLife put the 11,250-apartment, postwar complex on the block in September 2006, it was clear the contest for Stuy Town was going to be a pricey battle, as New York City real estate’s biggest names all wanted a chance at the trophy.

Now, the prospect of default looms for Tishman Speyer, and a rent-regulation case being decided by the state’s top court could leave the complex with a value of just a fraction of its sale price.

JUST AS Stuyvesant Town is now a poster child for the contagious profligacy and irrationality that swept over the industry like a virulent plague, it was, at the time of bidding, a model for the boundless optimism and impenetrable confidence investors had in the real estate market and the very future of New York. As such, the bids MetLife received all around were, by the nature of their high numbers, extremely bullish, and today would be laughable.

The tenants’ group crafted a bid they said was about $4.5 billion. It included a pledge to keep 40 percent of the apartments at below market rates—20 percent rent-regulated, and another 20 percent to be sold at controlled prices—therefore relying on the remaining 60 percent of the units, as market-rate rentals, to bring in the bulk of the money to support the deal.

A look at Tishman Speyer’s current numbers illustrates just how difficult a task it is to raise the money needed for the deal (and the landlord has been particularly aggressive in deregulating rent-stabilized apartments in order to charge market-rate rents).

Based on a report on debt associated with the property, written earlier this month by the real estate analysis firm Realpoint, Tishman Speyer was on track in the spring to bring in $302.6 million in revenues for 2009, up about $50 million from 2007, but very far off the pace needed. In order to pay off its debt, the landlords had been expecting to take in $481.7 million annually by 2011, according to the report.

Based on the current amount of money coming in, Realpoint puts the value of the complex at $2.13 billion, a number that could go even lower should rents fall or the court decision go in favor of the tenants, according to the author of the report, Steve Kuritz, a senior vice president at Realpoint.

“Worst-case, their projected income could go down below what we’re seeing now, and in that case, the value could go down,” said Mr. Kuritz.

Had the tenants indeed won, the situation would not have been so dire, in part due to the model the group was proposing. Backed by labor-pension-fund money and other investors, in a model put together by Troutman Sanders attorney Leonard Grunstein, the tenants’ bid would have seen a substantial portion of the apartments being sold as co-ops, bringing a large infusion of money early in the process and spreading any losses out among the new co-op owners.

“We would have not had the same pressure to move tenants out of rent-stabilized apartments to the market rate,” said Councilman Dan Garodnick, a Peter Cooper Village resident, who led the organization of the tenant bid. “Short-term market fluctuations would have been less significant for us,” he added, rejecting the notion that the tenants’ loss in 2006 was a hidden blessing. “The tenants would be much better off if we had won.”

IN A NEW twist, it’s now at least conceivable that the tenants—along with other former bidders—might just have another crack at Stuy Town, this time at presumably a much less inflated price. Tishman Speyer is on pace, before the end of the year, to exhaust the reserve fund that has been helping it to make debt payments, as Realpoint reported the fund had just $33 million left as of September, down from $400 million in 2007. Since June, the report said that between $7 million and $19 million has been taken out of the reserve fund each month.

In terms of the existing investors, things aren’t looking great. A Florida state pension fund recently wrote off its entire $250 million equity investment in Stuyvesant Town, presumably assuming it would never see any money back, given the many debt investors who are ahead in the queue. The first loan in line for repayment is a $3 billion mortgage now held by various bondholders, but there isn’t even enough money coming in yearly to support that, let alone pay back the rest of the $6.2 billion that was cobbled together to buy the property.

Just what shape a financial reshuffling takes—be it a sale, new investors, default, etc.—will have to wait, it seems, until after the deregulation court case is decided, interested observers say. That decision is likely coming in the next few weeks.

Rob Speyer, co-CEO of Tishman Speyer, has expressed confidence his firm will prevail in court, and has also said it intends to restructure the deal, though what role it eventually takes is unclear.

Would the tenants want another shot, opening the door for more press conferences and rallies, bullhorns and all? “If you talk to anybody, I think, at Stuyvesant Town,” said Mr. Doyle, of the tenants association, “they would be interested in pursuing that.”

ebrown@observer.com

But then people get to the recent headlines:

“Met won’t recognize tenants as bidder.”

“Attorney: Met knowingly took tax breaks in fair-market push.”

“More tenants getting notices of nonrenewal.”

Clearly, this is no P.R. tool for the landlord.

Delivered every Thursday morning to roughly 8,000 subscribers, the independent community newspaper has chronicled life in and around the massive Manhattan apartment complex ever since its post–World War II construction by Metropolitan Life Insurance. According to some readers, Town & Village has become as much of a neighborhood institution as the historic affordable-housing development itself.

Founded in 1947 by a former Army public-information officer turned newspaperman, Charles Hagedorn, Town & Village has long striven to present local news with a small-town sensibility, as evidenced by its relentless coverage of little-league baseball, flea markets and the abundant squirrel population, which overruns the complex’s common areas and which might offer a tasty snack, according to a recent, rather fuzzy front-page story (“Mmmm … squirrel? Now that’s yummy!”).

Town & Village’s torchbearers insist that the paper never shies away from more contentious issues, reporting extensively on neighborhood crime as well as the frequent landlord-tenant disputes that inevitably arise at any rental property, particularly one so enormous.

Lately, though, the landlord-tenant stuff has taken up an awful lot of column inches.

IN THE MONTHS BEFORE AND AFTER OCTOBER'S whopping $5.4 billion sale of the property by MetLife, the paper has been chock-full of angry tenant rhetoric about rent hikes, nonrenewals and costly facility upgrades. Yet it’s had little in response from ownership—generally, no comment.

Rob Speyer, a principal with his family’s real-estate conglomerate who worked closely on the historic deal with MetLife, did not, in keeping with tradition, respond to interview requests for this story.

“They try to tell it like it is—much to management’s chagrin,” said one employee of Stuy Town and Cooper Village, who asked to remain anonymous.

Some readers have described Town & Village’s aggressive coverage as striking an almost “threatening” or “militant” tone.

Current Town & Village publisher Christopher Hagedorn, the founder’s son, who now owns the eponymous publishing company that backs the paper, has heard it all before.

“My father was called a communist,” he said, harking back to Papa Hagedorn’s contentious coverage of Stuy Town’s segregationist policies during the 1950’s.

The paper has long thrived despite a precarious relationship with the property’s owners, Mr. Hagedorn said, recalling that when his father was editor, “MetLife hired a P.R. firm to deal with Charles Hagedorn.”

For a period in the late 80’s, he added, MetLife refused to talk to Town & Village reporters altogether—a situation that might have contributed to some readers’ slanted view of its editorial mission.

“The paper has a fine line to tread,” said Mr. Hagedorn, 62. “You have tenants who have very legitimate gripes and problems—and, as a newspaper, the tenants have to be represented. By the same token, in fairness, we have to represent the views of the landlord.

“Over the years, it’s been very misunderstood, I think, from both sides,” he added.

The tradition continues with Mr. Hagedorn’s current batch of muckrakers, whose recent coverage has dared to toe, yet not quite cross, the landlord-bashing line.

“I don’t think it’s us,” said executive editor Sabina Mollot, one of two full-time Town & Village staffers, who also serves as a reporter, photographer and page designer. “The paper reflects the mood and the attitude of the people here. I think a lot of people are bitter about the way the community is changing.”

CHANGE, AFTER ALL, CAN BE FRIGHTENING.

A longtime haven for military veterans and middle-class families—many of whom have lived there for decades—Stuy Town and Cooper Village’s ongoing transition from affordable to market-rate rents has taken on Orwellian implications of late, including the new owner’s reported hiring of a private investigator to root out illegal subletters taking advantage of rent-stabilized units.

Perhaps the most controversial move by Big Brother has involved management’s ongoing implementation of an electronic key-card system to enter the development’s 110 buildings, an issue that Ms. Mollot has been covering for the past three years. And counting.

“For a while, it was all we wrote about—it was that controversial.”

Ms. Mollot, 28, can speak to the controversy from both sides, as a matter of security for ownership and as a privacy issue for residents.

In her relentless reporting, she even came up with an angle that few others would have thought of, drawing connections between the key-card installation at Cooper Village and declining attendance at a local Orthodox temple, whose members are prohibited from using electronics on the Sabbath.

“Because,” explained Ms. Mollot, who previously worked as a reporter for the Orthodox Jewish Press, “these people didn’t want to have to stand around in the cold and wait to be let back in by security after services.”

As a non–Stuy Town or Cooper Village resident, Ms. Mollot can claim at least some degree of objectivity in her reporting, though even her explanation seemed to betray some personal leanings.

“If my rent got raised 20 percent, it would be hard to appear unbiased,” she confessed during a recent stroll through the complex.

“There are some people that just expect us to beat up on management, just because they’re angry about their rents going up,” said Ms. Mollot. “But, at the same time, of course we’re going to print management’s point of view and the landlord’s point of view.”

If, that is, she can get it.

While the complex’s current managers, the Rose family’s Rose Associates, have been quick to respond to crime reports and maintenance issues, ownership has remained mum on the far more anxious issues of rent hikes and nonrenewals.

Tishman Speyer’s long-term plans for the property also remain a mystery, Ms. Mollot said.

For longtime residents, the future has seemed frighteningly murky ever since the disappearance of plaques once posted in the common areas, which spoke of the complex’s original aim: to provide a place where “families of moderate means might live in health, comfort and dignity in park-like communities.”

“When the complex went to free-market, the plaques were taken out by MetLife,” Ms. Mollot said. “People are always asking me, ‘Why did they rip out those plaques?’ So I’m always asking, ‘People wanna know: Why did you rip out the plaques?’ No comment, no comment, no comment.”

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[NY Times]

[Daily News]

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Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

The release says that MetLife will keep a "substantial ongoing presence" in super-spurned Long Island City. Whatever. It's all further evidence that no one wants to take the E or V train.

But don't tell that to the Elghanayans.

Release after the jump.

- John Koblin

MetLife, Inc. (NYSE: MET) and Equity Office (NYSE: EOP) announced today that MetLife has signed a 21-year lease at 1095 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. MetLife will occupy 12 floors in the building or approximately 410,000 square feet.

Michael Berman, vice president-leasing for Equity Office's NY market along with a team of senior brokerage professionals from CB Richard Ellis, including Robert Alexander, Robert Stillman and Zachary Freeman represented Equity Office in the transaction. Peter Rigardi, president of the Jones Lang LaSalle's New York Tri-State Region, and Lloyd Desatnick, senior vice president of Jones Lang LaSalle's New York Tri-State Region, represented MetLife in the transaction. Partner David Brooks and Associate Noah Shapiro of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP were the attorneys for the transaction.

The company expects to begin moving certain operations, including a portion of its employees currently based in MetLife's Long Island City (LIC), Queens office, into the building, which is owned and is being redeveloped by Equity Office, in the fourth quarter of 2008. MetLife intends to maintain a substantial ongoing presence in Queens. The LIC office, which will remain a key location for MetLife, will become primarily an IT Center of Excellence for the company.