Q2 2026: ~11M sf leased, +19% YoY (down 6.5% from a strong Q1).

H1 2026: 22.8M sf — strongest first half since 2002.

Average asking rent $78.03/sf — highest since July 2020, +5.7% YoY.

Largest Q2 deal: Simpson Thacher 916K sf at Extell’s 570 Fifth Avenue.

Law and beauty/consumer tenants (L’Oréal, Cleary Gottlieb) drove the biggest blocks.

The recovery is real but narrow — trophy space, not the average building.

Rising average rents partly reflect a mix shift toward the best assets.

Manhattan leasing is running at a pace it hasn’t touched in over two decades. That fact deserves to be stated plainly before it gets qualified — 22.8M sf in six months is a genuine demand signal, not a dead-cat bounce.

The qualifier matters just as much. The blocks getting leased are trophy floors at named towers, and the tenants are credit occupiers signing long. The average $78 asking rent is inflated by that flight to quality — commodity Class B is not sharing the party.

For owners, the bifurcation is the whole story. Trophy assets are re-pricing up; everything below is still a candidate for conversion or repricing down. One market is producing two completely different underwriting outcomes.

The structural read: New York’s supply of leasable trophy space is finite and shrinking as conversions pull inventory. Scarcity at the top is doing real work on rents.

Underwrite Manhattan office by tier, never by average. The gap between trophy and commodity is now the trade — long credit leases at the top, basis-driven conversion plays at the bottom, and very little worth owning in the middle.

Manhattan office isn’t recovering evenly — it’s splitting into an asset you’d finance and one you’d convert.

Source: The Real Deal · CBRE — July 2026