Sentinel Capital adds 7,134 square feet at SL Green's fully leased One Vanderbilt

Sentinel Capital Partners has taken another 7,134 square feet at SL Green's fully leased One Vanderbilt, lifting the private equity firm to 34,737 square feet on a portion of the 54th floor in a deal announced Monday by the landlord and reported by Commercial Observer. Newmark's Brian Waterman and David Waterman negotiated for Sentinel; SL Green was represented in-house.

Neither the lease term nor the asking rent came with the announcement, which pushes the economics back onto the building's own published band, where SL Green's Steven Durels told Commercial Observer in February that rents ran from $250 a square foot to well over $300.

Sentinel is adding space in a building with nothing left to lease: the 1.7 million-square-foot tower on Vanderbilt Avenue, just west of Grand Central Terminal, is 100 percent leased, according to SL Green, and the firms around Sentinel are financial—TD Bank, Carlyle Group and Oak Hill Advisors, whose $100.7 billion in regulatory assets per PRED's records is the scale of tenant a landlord keeps at these rents. SL Green itself occupies the building too, while Greenberg Traurig is the exception in that crowd and the larger of the two recent deals: the law firm signed a 10.5-year commitment this month for another 33,477 square feet, taking its footprint to 133,365.

At about four-tenths of one percent of the tower, the expansion is a trivial amount of space. Who is signing it, and where, is the part worth reading. The office market no longer clears at a single price, and this month shows both halves of that argument: Thor Equities' agreement to buy ESRT's 1359 Broadway for $218 million, and the $386 million against 200 Madison Avenue that our reporting sized to Havas's lease and a three-year clock, sit on the debt-and-per-foot side of the ledger. One Vanderbilt lives on the other side, where a rent band of $250 to more than $300 a square foot still pulls a private equity tenant into more space than it had. An expansion covering part of a single floor reads more like headcount than like a real estate decision, which suggests Sentinel needed room rather than a new address.

Both of the tower's recent deals expand tenants already inside it, leaving the leasing momentum at One Vanderbilt in the hands of its own roster. SL Green has published the rent range and not the price of the 54th-floor space, and until it attaches one, the lease is a fact about occupancy at the trophy end of Midtown rather than about pricing.