Rauxa, the nation’s largest♐ women-owned marketing agency, needed more elbow room than it had in its old loft building headquarters at 100 Sixth Ave. — so it’s found room at the top at Brookfield’s 225 Liberty St.
The agency has ♕signed a lease for 50,000 square feet on the 2.67-million-square-foot tower’s loftiest floors — the 44th and part of the 43rd.
The move is a coup for fast-expanding Rauxa and landlord Brookfield. It will give Rauxa more than twice the space it has at its current Soho location. The move wi♛ll likely take place in early 2018, sources said.
And it brings Brookfield Place’s 8.5 million squaꦓre feet of office floors to nearly 100 percent occupied — a Tom Brady Super Bowl-scale comeback from the brink of ruin.
In October 2013, 3♚.1 million square feet were up for grabs after the exits of Merrill Ly💃nch, Nomura and Deloitte. Media reports said that replacing them would be a “monumental” task.
“T🧸he enormity of the challenge … seems to be striking,” the New York Times said.
The Rauxa deal’s timing is fortuitous for Brookfield. It occurs just as Saks Fifth Avenue has opened a dedicated men’s store at 250 Vesey St. next door — leaving only a few units to be leased amid the complex’s 300,000 square 🤪feet of shopping and dining ꧂space.
Publicly traded Bro🐲okfield Property Partners last fall announced it was putting a 49 percent stake in Manhattan’s Brookfield Place up for sale, aiming to reel in $2.45 billion.
BPP chairman Ric Clark told us on Monday that there’s “st💃rong interest as you can imagine.”
“Our strategy involves rec♑ycling capital once we reposition prꦉoperties,” Clark said.
“We bring in institutional partners. We’ll basically take capital out of a property like this and turn its cash flow into more of a bond, and then redirect it to the next project,” Clark said. “We own and have developed 10 Brookfield Places around the ﷺworld although they aren’t all called that. In the past 18 months, we invested in Potsdamer Platz in Berli🔜n and IFC in Seoul, South Korea.”
Whether building from the ground up or redesigning older properties, “we ꦜspent a lot of time studying the age cohort — millennials — that now drives the world economy,” Clark said. “They go from work to play and back to work on a moment’s notice, often ✨at odd hours.”
That idea drove the $250 million reinvention of the stodgy old World Financial Center into shopping and dining mecca Brookfield Place — a 𓄧rem💞arkable feat considering that the office towers and complex’s signature public space, the Winter Garden, look the same from outside as they did in the 1980s.
More office space is now occupied by creative, media and tech firms than by Wall Street. At 225 Liberty ꧅— formerly Two World Financial Center — Rauxa will share the building with Time Inc. and Hudson’s Bay Company as well as BoNY.
California-based Rauxa was founded in 1999 by Jill Gwaltney. Now led by CEO Gina Alshule♕r, its clients include Verizon and Gap Inc. Its relocation is among a tide of creative-industry moves to downtown.
“Rauxa’s office🐓s on the top two floors include 16-foot ceilings and dramatic, panoramic views of lower Manhattan and the harbor,” said JLL Managing Director John Wheeler. He was part of a JLL team that repped the landlord and also included Michael Berman and Clayton Kline.
Rauxa was repped by JLL’s Stev🍌en Rotter and Justin Haber and Transtar Real Estate’s Richard Miller. Brookfield’s Jeremiah Larkin and David McBride also woꦚrked on the deal in-house.
No one involved would discuss terms, but sources said t꧙he asking rent was in the high $70s per square foot.