Hillary Clinton’s staff are working with global real estate broker CB Richard Ellis to find a headquarters for her likely 2016 presidential campaign, TIME has learned from several sources familiar with the matter.
Her campaign headquarters would likely be located in Brooklyn or Queens, where commercial rents are significantly cheaper than in Manhattan. It’s unclear whether, or how soon Clinton will settle on a headquarters.
The Los-Angeles-based brokerage CBRE has worked with the Clintons in the past. Roshan Shah, a broker and senior vice president at CBRE, helped the William J. Clinton Foundation negotiate the move out of its Harlem offices. CBRE declined to comment.
There aren’t many options for large, contiguous office spaces in downtown Brooklyn and Queens, where a high demand for commercial leases has raised prices in recent years. The current average annual rent price per square foot of office space in Brooklyn is around $40-$45. Prices in a 2013 report indicated averages around $35 per square foot in Brooklyn compared with around $60 in Manhattan.
Clinton’s staff privately toured office space at MetroTech last year, a large office complex in downtown Brooklyn, and have also looked at the One Pierrepont Plaza building in Brooklyn Heights. The Pierrepont building is home to over 120,000 square feet of available office space.
Both spaces are owned by Forest City Ratner, whose chairman Bruce Ratner is a Democrat and an ally of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. De Blasio served on Clinton’s 1999 campaign for Senator in New York.
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In 2011 and 2012, the Obama campaign leased 50,000 square feet of office space in the Prudential Building in Chicago, which is now available for $20 to $27 per square foot but was cheaper four years ago, according to the current property managers.
Clinton has been courted by Westchester notables in an effort to attract the presumptive presidential candidates 2016 campaign to the New York City suburb.
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