Manhattan office leasing runs ahead of 2025 pace through third quarter, JLL reports

Manhattan office landlords cleared 6.9 million square feet in the third quarter of 2026, carrying nine-month volume to 25.7 million square feet and leaving the market 600,000 square feet, or 2 percent, ahead of the same stretch of 2025, according to JLL's October report as carried by IREI; the four anchor deals JLL names explain more about the quarter than the total does.

Anthropic signed for 462,000 square feet in a relocation and expansion to 330 Hudson St., Snapchat took 199,000 square feet in a sublease relocation to 2 Penn Plaza, Proskauer Rose renewed 413,000 square feet at 11 Times Square, and Morgan Lewis renewed 205,000 square feet at 345 Park Ave., leaving JLL to call the quarter broad-based across major industries with tech and law firms supplying the anchors.

Two of those four deals, 618,000 of the 1.28 million square feet, are renewals, which hold rent rolls in place without putting vacant space to work; they can lift a leasing statistic while leaving the availability rate where it was. Snapchat's sublease relocation fills 2 Penn Plaza and, in the ordinary mechanics of a move, returns space elsewhere, and on the record JLL provides, Anthropic's is the one deal that enlarges a footprint.

This publication has argued that the maturity wall has split into a multifamily lender strike and a trophy-office markdown, and leasing demand is the input that keeps the second half of that split from being purely a debt story; a buyer underwriting a Manhattan tower still needs a debt stack that pencils at current coupons or a basis low enough to survive a re-tenanting. In San Francisco, the buyer of 875 and 899 Howard paid for a leasing option while Hudson Pacific kept the re-leasing bill.

The tenant mix strengthens that argument: New York's tech headcount topped San Francisco's for the first time earlier this year, and Anthropic, the covenant and concentration behind AI data center build-outs, now shows up in the Manhattan office market as the largest of the deals JLL names.

Three quarters of 2026 lead the same period of 2025 by less than the 661,000 square feet Anthropic and Snapchat leased between them this quarter; a fourth quarter that only matches 2025 would erase the 600,000-square-foot lead.