Shopify Signs at Related, Vornado’s 85 Tenth Avenue

Shopify added a bigger Manhattan office space to cart at Related Companies’ and Vornado Realty Trust’s 85 Tenth Avenue.

The e-commerce company signed a lease for approximately 36,000 square feet at the Chelsea office property, Bloomberg reported. The Ottawa-based firm will occupy part of the building’s eighth floor.

It’s not clear how long the lease will last. Shopify is paying more than $100 per square foot, well over the $75.28 per square foot average recorded in Manhattan by Colliers during the third quarter.

Vornado and Related boast a tech-heavy tenant roster at 85 Tenth Avenue. Biometric screening company CLEAR in 2021 leased 120,000 square feet at the property, paying an average rent of $110 per square foot over the course of a 15-year lease, excluding a monthly abatement.

Google, another tenant of the 11-story, 635,000-square-foot Chelsea property, occupies 240,000 square feet there after tacking on 60,000 square feet to its existing space in 2017.

Office leasing in activity jumped 26 percent from the second quarter to the third, according to a report from Colliers. But available space remained at an all-time high of 19.4 percent because more than a fifth of the quarter’s leasing activity came from two leases; demand would have otherwise been flat.

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Big tech’s embrace of remote and hybrid work has been one of the many drivers behind the office market struggles. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, in particular, is making massive real estate cuts across its portfolio.

Elsewhere in the city, Shopify took over a Soho storefront in 2020 through a sublease deal with Google. The space at 131 Greene Street was for a brick-and-mortar shop. That lease runs through August.

Also in 2020, the company signed a lease for two floors spanning nearly 25,000 square feet at 148 Lafayette Street in Soho.

— Holden Walter-Warner