Real-estate experts predicted it would rank among the city’s most expensive towers, and, indeed, during the spring of 2007 the shimmering glass fortress planned for West 55th Street displayed all the grace notes of a building boom.
Had construction on that one-million-square-foot, 40-story building actually topped out during the boom, they said, it might have commanded as much as $1,500 a square foot from tenants and driven the asset’s value to $1.5 billion.
But months into the ambitious Boston Properties project, the Great Recession bared its fangs, followed by the crash of Lehman Brothers. In its wake, the building-that-could at 250 West 55th Street lost the law firm Gibson Dunn as a tenant. In 2009, a second practice, Proskauer Rose, also abandoned ship, prompting the developer to halt all its construction at the site that February.
But as a wise man once said: All good things come to those who wait. In the same month that Lehman collapsed, in fact, longtime CB Richard Ellis brokers Paul Myers (right in the photo) and John Maher accepted an assignment from the San Francisco-based law practice Morrison Foerster, a CBRE client since 1990 that was again considering a move from its Vornado Realty-owned office at 1290 Avenue of the Americas. It should come as no surprise that the economic climate was positively frigid at the time.
“Just like you need justification when you’re telling a client to do a deal, you need a similar amount of justification to say don’t do a deal,” said Mr. Myers, an Ohio-born executive vice president who has worked in real estate for 25 years. “So when we were there telling clients like Morrison Foerster to sit on their hands back in 2009, they wanted to know why, and we explained that we needed to monitor the market.”
As those who regularly scan the real-estate rags already know, the three-year search for office space ended two weeks ago with a blockbuster 15-year lease for 180,000 square feet at the stalled skyscraper.
The anchor-tenant deal not only paves the way for Boston Properties to relaunch its construction, which is slated for completion in 2014, but may also reignite what observers now predict could be another big building boom. If that does happen, thank Messrs. Myers and Maher, otherwise known as the men behind the MoFo transaction.
“This has been one of the busiest years of our careers,” added Mr. Myers, 47, who said the law firm began seriously considering a transaction at 250 West 55th Street at the beginning of January. “I mean, talk about getting in early and staying late. It’s been both for us, and we’ve been busy on a lot of projects.”
That’s a bold statement from a team that, since pairing in 1994, has been behind several of the most significant anchor-tenant transactions of the past two decades. And that’s on top of the deals they’ve inked for law firms like Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and ad firms like Saatchi & Saatchi, to name only a few of the legal, advertising and financial services clients they’ve won.
Along the way, of course, their laurels have piled high as well. For Mr. Myers, that includes membership within the Colbert Coldwell Circle, ranking 19th among more than 2,000 CBRE producers nationwide in 1995. For Mr. Maher, meanwhile, his successful leasing since 1985 of more than five million square feet at a value of roughly $4 billion has resulted in a litany of plumb assignments, including the representation of the GM Building.
FOR BOTH OF THE brokers, each of whom has netted 25 years with the firm, all of those big accolades and gains have been earned while on CB Richard Ellis’s clock.
“This is my first real job out of school,” said Mr. Maher, 50, a New Jersey-born executive vice president who was the first participant of CBRE’s highly regarded “Wheel” training program. “A lot of my friends sort of teased me because they thought I would never work for one company my whole life.”
The Cal Ripken-like dedication to the firm has paid off. Besides the Morrison & Foerster transaction, the duo also inked a deal in April with Baker Hostetler. After five previous deals with the law practice, the latest landing them at Rockefeller Center, the law firm again returned to Messrs. Myers and Maher to explore options.
Although the world’s 85th-largest law firm preferred to stay at its offices at Rockefeller Center, Mr. Maher said the complex offered almost no vacant space for growth. In the end, however, the duo finalized a negotiation with landlord Tishman Speyer to clear out two floors of nine tenants in an effort that allowed the law firm to expand by 50,000 square feet of contiguous space for a total of about 120,000 square feet, the brokers said.
“So we have a nice little law practice business,” said Mr. Maher, who, with clients like Arkin Schaffer & Supino and Morgan and Finnegan, certainly does have a nice little law practice.
“And this is how a lot of our deals get done,” added Mr. Myers. “Because to do a deal you need to do 10 deals.”
But as with Morrison & Foerster, some of their most significant deals are with clients like Fuji Photo Film, which, as an anchor tenant in Edison, N.J., made possible the development of a new building in the Garden State. It’s deals like those, the brokers said, that allow tenants and landlords to benefit.
Less than four years after partnering, in fact, they masterminded the iconic dot-com era deal for Scient Corp., the Internet consulting firm that signed a lease in 1998 at the Tishman Speyer-owned 222 East 41st Street. After its spectacular run, the firm was acquired several times over and then eventually smothered along with other start-ups of the late-1990’s tech boom and bust.
“That was all during, I guess, the dot-com bubble … boom … bust … ” said Mr. Myers, searching for the precise term to describe what was then an Internet gold rush. “What were they calling it?”
“Well, whatever they were calling it, we did that deal during the boom,” added Mr. Maher to great laughter.
