Sunday Summary: Happy New Year!

We can’t fully say we’re sorry to see 2022 go. It was better than 2021, and much better than 2020 (we hope that this at least indicates a positive trajectory!) but it’s not as though 2022 didn’t come with its share of disappointments.

We recently looked at the top 10 leases in New York over the past year — as well as the top 10 sales of the year — and they’re always valuable in taking stock of a year and finding out what went right and what went wrong. (JLL’s Robert Knakal also offered his always valuable commentary.)

CO reporter Rebecca Baird-Remba took a step back and tried to put New York’s real estate landscape in context, and it’s worth reading over if only to emphasize that there were good stories in 2022, along with some cruddy ones. (Office leasing, for instance, showed improvement. There was 9.9 million square feet of leasing in the third quarter, a 24 percent uptick from the previous quarter. That being said, average asking rents slid from $76 a square foot in the second quarter to $74 per square foot. And that has been sort of the story of real estate’s recovery from the shock of COVID-19 — for every step forward there’s a step backwards.)

But beyond just the metrics the big picture also means looking back month by month on our biggest stories.

In January, we learned that the Post Brothers closed a whopping $400 million loan on a 1.9 million-square-foot megadevelopment (the largest residential development in the U.S., in fact) in Philadelphia.

In February, Glendale USA Corporation sold a fully leased 75,600-square-foot office to the Georgetown Company for $93 million. (The tenant made for one of the more intriguing parts of the sale: Netflix.)

Much to our shock, March brought the news that Blackstone, the largest private landlord in the world, was handing the keys back on 1740 Broadway. “It’s the smartest move for their investors,” one source noted.

Down to their last dollar, the West-Park Presbyterian Church took the unusual step of appealing their landmark status so that they could sell themselves to a developer in April.

Of course, May brought Power Finance and Power 100. Those are always good for a re-read. (Speaking of the power players of real estate, it’s also worth a look at the feature we ran on Stephen Ross’ efforts to essentially take over Miami.)

There was more power play in June — we looked at the top dogs of Washington, D.C.

We received some extremely sad news in July. Bisnow’s CEO Will Friend was struck by lightning off the coast of North Carolina and died at the far too young age of 33.

August is usually the time to kick back and take some time off … which is sort of what Amazon decided to do beyond just August. They nixed or delayed some 50 warehouses. (Maybe they got wind of the crazy pipeline in the works. But that pipeline still sounds pretty necessary.)

September meant Power L.A.!

Despite what all the naysayers have said about retail, in October Target decided to open a massive 140,000-square-foot location in Bruckner Commons in The Bronx.

In November, CO put out both its Owners Magazine and its Lenders Magazine … but we also had plenty to say about East Side Access.

And it wouldn’t be a 2022 without our annual Young Professionals issue, where we could look a little ahead into the industry’s future and that’s what we did in December.

We’ll leave you with that today. Again, happy New Year!