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Seventeen months after putting office space in the Time Warner Center on the market, the developers of Manhattan's highest-profile new office buildings have given up on renting the space and are occupying it themselves.
After a fruitless search for tenants, The Related Cos. and Apollo Real Estate Advisors are both moving their headquarters into the complex's north tower. They will take up to a combined 106,000 square feet of the space that had been marketed to tenants.
Time Warner is buying the remaining vacant space, about 105,000 square feet, and will try to sublet it. The company does not plan to lower the rents, says a spokeswoman. Asking rents in the building are about $70 a square foot.
Related Executive Vice President Marty Berger says putting his company's headquarters in the space was always an option.
"We marketed the space to see if it could be leased, and we could have done something else," he says, adding that the marketing effort could have been more extensive. "We had one brokers' party - one."
The difficulty in renting space in the building would have been unthinkable in 1997, when Apollo and Related announced plans for the double towers, which were hailed as a model of development. Along with 1.4 million square feet of office space, the complex includes a retail mail and hotel on the...