Leasing Momentum

Few people in the real estate industry doubt that the towers will be filled. The newness of the buildings and the market-leading rents they’re seeking have contributed to the slow pace of leasing, said Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive officer of CBRE Group Inc.’s New York/tri-state region.

“It takes a while to fill these buildings,” said Tighe, who is co-head of the leasing team at Larry Silverstein’s 4 World Trade Center and 3 World Trade Center, which is still under construction. “I actually feel we’ve begun to develop momentum, and momentum is always the secret to leasing.”

So far, about 3.3 million square feet have been rented at 1 and 4 World Trade Center, including Conde Nast’s 1.2 million square feet, according to CoStar. The banking and insurance industries, which occupied almost 80 percent of the old World Trade Center’s leased space, make up 1.3 percent of current tenants, according to CoStar.

Media, Tech

Media, advertising, computer-technology and communications companies have taken almost 33 percent of the space rented so far, compared with only about 3 percent at the old World Trade Center, the research firm’s data show. About 40 percent is from government tenants that agreed to lease space in the middle of the last decade to help jumpstart construction of the towers. The remainder came from business services, real estate and other fields.

For High 5 Games, a developer of casino and social media games, 1 World Trade Center was “complementary to Silicon Valley on the West Coast,” said Patrick Benson, vice president of marketing. The firm, currently based at 770 Broadway in the East Village, took 87,663 square feet on floors 58 and 59.

“It provided everything that we needed,” including state- of-the-art technology, a “blank slate” of column-free offices, and room for expansion, Benson said.

‘Much Hipper’

Interest from tenants like High 5, which usually have younger workers, is a reflection of how downtown has become “a much hipper area,” said Marc Shapses, a broker with Savills Studley Inc.

The days of financial companies being dominant downtown “are gone” after many moved to Midtown, he said. “And it’s a more conservative move now for those companies to just stay put, to renew their leases” at their current headquarters as a cost- saving move.

Banks including Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and UBS Group AG have considered and rejected going to the trade center site.