Investment firm renews office lease
Trexquant renewal at First Stamford Place a boost for local office market
STAMFORD — Quantitative investment firm Trexquant has renewed its lease for about 9,800 square feet of space at First Stamford Place, one of the largest office complexes in Connecticut.
The renewal will extend until July 2024 Trexquant’s lease at First Stamford Place, where it has been a tenant since 2012, landlord Empire State Realty Trust announced this week. The 779,000-square-foot property in the city’s Waterside section stands a couple of blocks from the downtown Metro-North train station and also overlooks Interstate 95.
A message left for Trexquant was not immediately returned. The firm focuses on developing and trading “statistically-based medium-frequency equity strategies” and uses thousands of models to trade thousands of stocks, according to its website.
Torey Walsh from Newmark Knight Frank represented Trexquant in the
lease negotiations. Jeffrey Newman and Kimberly Zaccagnino represented ESRT along with Jay Hruska, Steve Baker, Bill Montague and John Altieri from Cushman & Wakefield.
Officials at ESRT cited the accolades its entire portfolio has received as the first in North America to be certified under the WELL health-safety rating. The portfolio has also earned a five-star rating from GRESB, which provides environmental, social and governance benchmarking for real estate and infrastructure investments across the world.
“ESRT is happy to extend our relationship with Trexquant,” Newman, senior vice president of ESRT, said in a statement. “With these certifications, ESRT’s overall leadership in indoor environmental quality, and First Stamford Place’s direct access off I-95 with proximity to the Stamford Transportation Center, the property serves as the ideal location for companies to recruit and retain employees from across the tristate area.”
As of Sept. 30, about 86 percent of First Stamford Place was occupied. Its largest tenants, based on square footage, are Franklin Templeton, Odyssey Re, Partner Re, Ernst & Young and Crane Co.
A couple of blocks away, ESRT also owns the Metro Center office complex at 1 Station Place. In Fairfield County’s largest leasing deal of the third quarter of 2020, Berkley Insurance
Co., a subsidiary of Greenwich-based insurance giant W.R. Berkley Corp., signed a lease there for about 63,000 square feet there.
The ESRT office portfolio encompasses more than nine million rentable square feet of space 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.
Last week, southwestern Connecticut recorded one of its largest office-leasing deals in recent years as Nuvance Health announced it would take 222,000 square feet of space in the Summit complex in Danbury. The Nuvance network includes Danbury Hospital, Norwalk Hospital and New Milford Hospital.
The area, however, is still acutely feeling the impact of the coronavirus crisis, which has prompted many companies in the past year to temporarily vacate their offices and move their employees to remote working arrangements.
Fairfield County’s leasing volume increased nearly 12 percent from the second quarter, to a total of about 510,000 square feet. But it trailed by nearly 25 percent the amount in the third quarter of 2019.
While the leasing activity remained sluggish, Fairfield County’s vacancy rate has not changed much recently. It ran at 27.8 percent in the third quarter, compared with 26.9 percent a year ago.