[NYguy]

http://www.commercialobserver.com/20...-for-51-astor/

First Tenant Near Signing at 51 Astor

By Daniel Geiger 5/14

Maverick developer Edward Minskoff is close to bagging his first tenant for 51 Astor Place, the spec office building he is boldly building in Cooper Square without any guaranteed tenants in hand.

Hult International Business School is in talks to take 51 Astor’s entire second floor, a roughly 55,000-square-foot space. Sources say the school could pay rents that begin in the $60s per square foot but escalate to around $100 per square foot over the life of a long term lease at the roughly 400,000-square-foot property. The deal isn’t done just yet, however. The school is still waiting to receive approval from the New York Board of Regents, the government body that oversees all educational institutions in the state, a source said.

The deal would be the first transaction in the 12-story building, which was designed by the acclaimed Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and is currently under construction.

While Mr. Minskoff has been shopping the office property to a host of prominent tenants, including Facebook and Microsoft according to industry sources, a deal with an education tenant was preordained when he bought into the project. Mr. Minskoff purchased the site from the university Cooper Union in 2007. The parcel used to be home to one of the school’s engineering buildings and included a requirement in its zoning that any structure Mr. Minskoff built retain about 50,000 square feet of educational use.