Amazon’s music streaming service took 40,000 square feet of production space at Rubenstein Partners and Heritage Equity Partners’ 25 Kent, Business Insider reported this week.
The owners of the newly constructed, 500,000-square-foot office, industrial and retail property leased 60,000 square feet of industrial space to streetwear brand Kith last December, and then it inked a 12,000-square-foot deal for a brewery with Randolph Beer. But its office leasing has been slow thus far, despite Rubenstein execs’ claims that they were chatting with tech and coworking companies last year.
So Amazon Music’s lease—along with the recent office deal for ad firm Mother New York in Gowanus—helps bolster optimism in the Brooklyn office market. Perhaps commercial tenants will want to pay pricey new-construction rents in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Downtown Brooklyn after all.
“I’m not surprised,” said Ofer Cohen, founder and president of Prospect Heights-based brokerage TerraCRG. “It’s consistent with everything we thought about the market and about Amazon needing to be here. Companies like Amazon have for years had the understanding that the creative media talent lives and loves Brooklyn. Williamsburg is one of the fastest-growing millennial clusters in the country.”
He added that 25 Kent, with its unique ziggurat shape and amenities, was always “going to be an anchor for Williamsburg. There’s really nothing else like it in the neighborhood.”
Dan Marks, a partner at TerraCRG, predicted that Brooklyn would benefit from workers’ desire to stay closer to home during the pandemic.
“People are going to want to go back to an office, but they’re not going to want to go back to an office in Manhattan,” he explained. “Brooklyn does not depend on incoming office workers coming from outer boroughs and other states for its vitality. Most of the people that live here work here too.”
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