Berkley Insurance to lease downtown Stamford space
STAMFORD — Berkley Insurance Co., a subsidiary of Greenwich-based insurance giant W.R. Berkley Corp., has signed a lease for 63,173 square feet at the Metro Center office complex in downtown Stamford, landlord Empire State Realty Trust announced Wednesday.
Representing one of southwestern Connecticut’s largest officeleasing deals of the past year, BIC is set to relocate in the summer of 2021 and occupy through 2033 one and a half floors at Metro Center, which stands across the street from the downtown MetroNorth Railroad station. BIC is now based a few blocks east at 301 Tresser Blvd.
“We are thrilled to welcome Berkley Insurance Co. to Metro Center,” Jeffrey Newman, senior vice president for ESRT, said in a statement. “The company will enjoy our new and recently renovated lobby, tenants-only gym and coffee shop. We look forward to a longstanding relationship with Berkley.”
A spokeswoman for W.R. Berkley confirmed the deal, saying that “certain of our operations will be occupying the new space.” W.R. Berkley, the No. 402 firm on this year’s Fortune 500 list and an organization that comprises about 50 companies, is headquartered at 475 Steamboat Road in Greenwich.
BIC was represented in the leasing negotiations by Belinda Scanlon, managing director of Bernard Realty, while Newmark Knight Frank, led by Managing Director James Ritman, joined Newman in representing ESRT.
The arrival of BIC will be a major boost for Metro Center, especially in light of media and professional-services firm Thomson Reuters’ announcement last December that it would relocate its local offices and lease more than 24,000 square feet at the neighboring 677 Washington Blvd.
Thomson Reuters’ lease for about 49,000 square feet at Metro Center expired at the end of April, according to ESRT officials.
Other tenants at the approxi
mately 285,000-square-foot Metro Center include Capstone Investment Advisors, Columbus Circle Investors, Exoduspoint Capital Management, Heidrick & Struggles, H.I.G., JLL, Jefferies & Co., Olympus Partners, Palladium Capital Management, Refinitiv, Tweedy, Browne Co., and Zimmer U.S. Inc.
Metro Center has a vacancy rate of about 9 percent, with 25,500 square feet available.
ESRT also owns the First Stamford Place office complex a few blocks west. Its office portfolio encompasses more than 9 million rentable square feet across 14 properties. Those holdings include its signature asset, the Empire State Building; eight other sites in Manhattan; MerrittView in Norwalk; as well as two locations in Westchester County, N.Y.
As swathes of the economy temporarily shut down and companies vacated offices in the spring in response to the spread of COVID-19, southwestern Connecticut’s commercial real estate market acutely felt the impact.
Fairfield County’s leasing volume from April through June plunged 29 percent from the first quarter of the year, according to a recent report by Newmark Knight Frank.
Some areas saw particularly pronounced declines. In Norwalk, “almost no leasing took place” in the second quarter, Newmark officials said in the report.
For the second quarter, the county’s vacancy rate ran at 27 percent — about the same as the level in the first quarter of the year and in the same period last year.
But a number of commercial real estate brokers have remained sanguine about the long term, arguing that southwestern Connecticut would be an attractive location for companies with large numbers of employees who live in the suburbs.
“(Companies) don’t want them working from home forever, but they sense that working closer to home might keep that productivity and keep employees happy,” Ritman said in a recent interview. “And others are coming out of (New York City) because they want to diversify their headcount and not have them all in Manhattan.”