Macklowe signs first deal at new tower.

Comps circulating in the market indicate that Harry Macklowe has just signed his first lease at 510 Madison Avenue, the new high-end boutique office building that his real estate firm, Macklowe Properties, is developing in midtown. The tower is scheduled for delivery next summer and boasts a sleek design and a number of luxurious amenities like a large garden deck, a health club and a pool that are geared towards attracting well-heeled tenants. While its structural beams have only begun to rise out of the ground, those features appear to have already given 510 Madison Avenue the mystique to lure space users from the collection of top office buildings nearby in the Plaza District and with whom it is ostensibly competing.

According to the comp, which is traded among brokers as market information and also used as a reference point for pricing their own deals, Macklowe has signed a lease with the investment firm Jay Goldman & Company. The firm will be relocating to the building from offices on the 48th floor of Carnegie Hall Tower where it has soaring Central Park views.

Located at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, world-class views are perhaps the only thing that 510 Madison Avenue doesn't have. But the deal with Jay Goldman & Co. shows what a formidable draw 510 Madison's exclusive club-like atmosphere and sparkling new space will be, even for tenants used to gazing out at the park. Jay Goldman & Co. is listed as paying just under $150 per square foot for an 11,500 s/f floor in the 30-story building. The floor will be in the mid-rise, but hasn't yet been determined, according to a source, because the landlord wants to be able to shuffle Jay Goldman & Co. so that its floor won't end up partitioning a block of space that a larger tenant may want to take contiguously.

In a conversation last week with rewonline.com, the billionaire real estate developer Leonard Stem paid the building a compliment by comparing it to his elite office building at 667 Madison Avenue, where he has his own offices. Like 510 Madison, 667 Madison is a slim office property that allows tenants with modest space needs to have floors in the building all to themselves. These types of spaces, with floorplates 15,000 s/f or smaller, have come into vogue in recent years among the rising number of hedge funds and private equity firms, tenants who have deep pockets but few employees to house. Because the industry has been so lucrative, investment funds have been among the most prolific leasers of exorbitantly price space.

As Real Estate Weekly first reported, investor Michael Price leased space in 667 Madison Avenue in September for rents that were said to rise to $225 per square foot, a rate that would make it the most expensive deal ever signed in Manhattan.

Leasing has so far been slow at 510 Madison Avenue, but brokers say the reason for that is because the investment fund tenants that much of the 350,000 s/f building's space will appeal to don't typically do deals until just ,months away from the expiration of their current space. With 510 Madison Avenue's summer delivery date just a few months away, a broker who handles many high end deals in the city said that the deal with Jay Goldman & Co. could be the start of increased leasing activity. Virtually all the building's space is available.