University Signs Massive Lease In The Heart Of Times Square

Touro College is consolidating its scattered Manhattan footprint in the heart of Times Square.

The private university system has signed a 32-year lease for 243K SF at Rudin Management’s 3 Times Square tower, the New York Post reports. Touro intends to relocate much of the graduate and undergraduate programming at its three Manhattan locations to the 30-story Midtown tower, built in 2001 as the U.S. headquarters of Thomson Reuters. 

Covering all or part of nine floors, Touro College and University System's campus at 3 Times Square will include classrooms, science and technology labs, a library and offices, as well as event space, student lounges and cafés. The school will have its own entrance and lobby on West 43rd Street. Asking rents weren't disclosed, although the Post reported rents in the building ranging from the low $70s to mid-$80s. Both Touro and Rudin were represented by teams from Cushman & Wakefield.  

At present, Touro leases or owns around 1M SF across New York City, mainly at its Manhattan campuses on West 31st, 40th and 125th streets. Much of the programming at those locations will be relocated to the new Midtown campus, including Touro’s business and pharmacy schools and programs in education, social work, technology and Jewish studies. 

Touro will be moving into a property at 3 Times Square that has been largely vacant since early in the pandemic when a number of major tenants moved out, including Bank of Montreal and FTI Consulting. Thomson Reuters is a minority stakeholder in the building but only uses a small amount of space. 

Rudin began a $25M renovation of the property in April, enlisting FXCollaborative to undertake a wide-ranging redesign of the building. Yet even with Touro as an anchor tenant, 3 Times Square has more than 500K SF available — it had the fifth-largest available block of office space in Manhattan as of last fall, when there was a 780K SF vacancy.

Record available inventory created an opportunity for Touro that would have been unimaginable previously, Rudin Executive Vice President Michael Rudin told the Post. The school had been looking to establish a centralized Manhattan campus for the better part of a decade but only began looking seriously at Times Square at the height of the pandemic in 2020. 

Rudin said building owners in Midtown, even Times Square, will increasingly see tenants from a broader range of industries than before the pandemic.

“We’re all calling audibles,” Rudin told the Post, noting that the university’s lease demonstrates “the continuing stretching of the market in terms of where tenants are willing to move.”