Cushman, Newmark Win REBNY Retail Deal Of The Year Awards
Urban Outfitters wanted to shrink its Fifth Avenue footprint and needed to find a space that would still work with its multi-level store layout.
The solution — a 15,000-square-foot lease at 575 Fifth Avenue — earned Cushman & Wakefield’s Sean Moran, Patrick O’Rourke, Catherine Merck and Steven Soutendijk the Most Ingenious Retail Deal of the Year award on Wednesday at REBNY’s 2025 Retail Deal of the Year Awards at Vornado’s 2 Penn Plaza, where dealmakers gathered to celebrate.
The brokers masterminded a move from Urban Outfitters’ 23,000-square-foot, two-level corner store at 521 Fifth Avenue into the smaller space on the corner of 47th Street. In order to seal the deal, they promised to build a new escalator connecting the lower level of the retail condo to the street level.
The space, which previously served as part of L’Oréal’s headquarters, was only connected to the building’s atrium, a common area subject to a thicket of zoning and city-planning requirements.
“To modify those spaces can be time-consuming and costly and challenging,” Moran said. “That’s something in retail we don’t normally get involved with.”
The Cushman team spent almost two years securing approvals to remove the escalators connecting the atrium to the lower level. They also won approval to open an elevator door on the opposite side of an existing one, allowing it to access the store directly and serve as Urban Outfitters’ ADA-compliant elevator.
The brokers negotiated a one-year extension at Urban Outfitters’ existing Fifth Avenue store, giving them time to finish construction.
Then they encountered another complication. The building was being sold as the lease was being negotiated. Real estate investment firms Sovereign Partners and HudsonPoint Capital bought the property from Beacon Capital Partners and MetLife for $378 million in April.
That left the Urban Outfitters deal in jeopardy if the new owner decided it wanted the retail space delivered vacant. (They ultimately decided to honor the lease.)
“That was another layer of approval that we rarely, rarely see,” Moran said.
Newmark’s Jeffrey Roseman and Drew Weiss took home the Most Impactful Retail Deal of the Year award for brokering luxury watchmaker Audemars Piguet’s 12,000-square-foot flagship at 785 Fifth Avenue. And Daija US COO Jeffrey Kleiner won the Retail Development/Project of the Year award for his work on the Waldorf Astoria New York redevelopment.
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