Why Manhattan's biggest landlords are all listing towers at once

Seven Manhattan office towers have come onto the market or changed hands within a matter of weeks. BXP is marketing its leasehold at 7 Times Square for upward of $700 million. Tishman Speyer wants roughly $450 million for 6 Grand Central. Property & Building Corporation is seeking more than $800 million for 10 Bryant Park, the former HSBC Tower. SL Green has agreed to sell two buildings in the same stretch, and Empire State Realty Trust found a buyer for a third within about a month of listing it.

The timing is not a coincidence. Landlords are betting that a leasing rebound, now tracking toward Manhattan's strongest year since 2000, can finally show up in sale prices rather than just higher rents. How many of these towers actually close, and at what prices, will set the benchmark other owners use to value the rest of the city's office stock.

The Towers Now on the Market

BXP, the real estate investment trust formerly known as Boston Properties, put its leasehold interest in 7 Times Square up for sale in July, hiring Eastdil Secured Savills brokers Will Silverman and Gary Phillips to find a buyer for upward of $700 million. The 1.2-million-square-foot tower sits on a 99-year ground lease that began in 1990 and includes an option to buy the underlying land from the city. It was about 91 percent leased, with tenants including Snowflake and the 246,000-square-foot KnitWell Group. The listing is part of a broader national disposition plan: BXP has closed more than $1.1 billion in sales across its portfolio in 2025 and 2026 and had targeted $1.9 billion in total proceeds.

Tishman Speyer listed 6 Grand Central, the 770,386-square-foot tower at Third Avenue and East 42nd Street formerly known as 666 Third Avenue, in August for about $450 million, or roughly $584 a square foot. The building connects directly to Grand Central Terminal through the Chrysler Building. Tishman bought it in 1998, renovated it in 2022 and rebranded it in 2024. Eastdil's Phillips and Silverman are marketing that listing too.

Property & Building Corporation, the owner of 10 Bryant Park, is asking more than $800 million for the roughly 865,000-square-foot former HSBC Tower. The company bought the building for $330 million in 2010 and has since put about $100 million into upgrades. Amazon signed a 330,000-square-foot lease there in 2025, and Life Time leased a 52,000-square-foot gym there. A previous deal for the tower, worth $855 million, was struck in 2021 but collapsed in 2022.

China Life Insurance Group put its minority stake in 1285 Sixth Avenue up for sale in August, at a price that would value the full tower at $1.4 billion.

Deals Already Under Contract

SL Green, Manhattan's largest office landlord, has agreed to sell two towers in recent months. In June it agreed to sell 10 East 53rd Street, a 390,000-square-foot, 37-story tower that was 92 percent leased, to Meadow Partners for $312.2 million — about $800 a square foot. The sale is expected to close in the third quarter and is part of a $2.5 billion strategic disposition plan the company set for 2026. SL Green's president and chief investment officer, Harrison Sitomer, called the sale "a meaningful step forward" in executing that plan.

In September, SL Green agreed to sell 110 Greene Street, a 223,000-square-foot SoHo building whose retail tenant is Balenciaga, to Natora Group for $226 million, or more than $1,000 a square foot. The company said the building had reached full occupancy at market-leading rents, with the deal set to close in the fourth quarter.

Empire State Realty Trust moved fastest of all. It listed 1359 Broadway, a 486,000-square-foot, debt-free tower near Herald Square, for $225 million in July and had, according to sources, agreed to a deal with Thor Equities within about a month, at $218 million, or roughly $448 a square foot; the building was 95 percent leased. ESRT has been trading actively on both sides of the market over the past year, having also agreed in April to sell its 26-story tower at 250 West 57th Street to Namdar Realty Group for roughly $280 million, while buying Scholastic's SoHo building for $386 million in December 2025.

Why Landlords Are Selling Into This Market

Brokers point to two forces converging. Leasing fundamentals are the strongest they have been since before the pandemic: tenants signed a lease at a reported $340 a square foot at 9 West 57th Street, and citywide leasing volume is on pace for its best year since 2000. At the same time, distress in commercial mortgage-backed securities has kept rising. The CMBS special servicing rate topped 11 percent in July, the second-highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. Separately, some owners with five- and seven-year funds are selling before capital must be returned to investors.

Gary Phillips of Eastdil Secured Savills, whose firm is marketing both 7 Times Square and 6 Grand Central, called the current leasing recovery "the strongest that I can remember." Brokers describe this cycle as unusual because leasing demand has outrun the capital markets rather than the other way around, and they argue sellers see little benefit in waiting months for conditions to improve given how unpredictable pricing has been. Green Street's Dylan Burzinski said he expects Manhattan to remain the strongest-performing office market in the country over the next few years, which combined with looser debt markets should keep pushing transaction volume higher.

Who's Actually Buying

The buyer pool mixes returning institutions — SL Green, Vornado and Beacon Capital Partners among them — with high-net-worth syndicators and family offices from around the world, plus private equity firms re-entering smaller deals. One notable absence is the Asian capital that was active in Manhattan office deals between 2014 and 2016 and has largely stayed out of this cycle; CBRE's Doug Middleton said more international capital needs to return before pricing can be pushed meaningfully higher.

Only nine single-property Manhattan office towers have sold for more than $700 million since 2020, and just two of those trades happened after 2022, underscoring how thin the pool of buyers for the largest deals remains. Manhattan office sales totaled $2.3 billion in the second quarter, up 42 percent from a year earlier and roughly matching the five-year quarterly average; total office investment grew 30 percent in 2025 to more than $11 billion.

The Caveats Brokers Keep Raising

Buyers remain selective, chasing mostly buildings that are more than 90 percent leased in proven Midtown corridors; weaker properties are more likely to face conversion or distress, as brokers say is the case at 825 Eighth Avenue and the Chrysler Building. Pricing also remains well below pre-pandemic levels in some cases: Silverstein Properties sold 1177 Avenue of the Americas for $571.1 million last year, far under the more than $1 billion it paid for the tower in 2007.

CBRE's Middleton also cautioned that not every listing will turn into a completed sale, saying it will be worth watching whether sellers accept real bids or hold out for their asking prices, and that recapitalizations — bringing in new equity or refinancing rather than selling outright — remain common. CBRE and Colliers do not fully agree on how tight the market already is: CBRE put Manhattan office availability at 14.4 percent in the second quarter, down 70 basis points from the prior quarter, while Colliers put it at 13.0 percent, the lowest level since October 2020. Average asking rents were $80.17 a square foot by CBRE's count and $78.03 by Colliers's; both show rents climbing, but the two firms differ on exactly how close the market has come to its pre-pandemic level of just under $80.