Walk and Talk with L&L Holding Co's Robert Lapidus Part 2

LK: So 425 is a Gold LEED certified building and it's also the first office building in New York City to get the WELL certification as well, can you tell us a little about what that means to the tenants and how did that impact the changes that you had to make for the building?

RL: Wellness is the next level you know LEED certification was something that has been important for a while, how they're going to measure how buildings actually are not just what energy efficiency they promised to do but what that efficiency looks like going forward, how that gets measured will be something, but wellness is really about the whole tenant experience so tenants and their employees care about the entire environment that they're working in, the cost is not that much so in a project that's over a billion dollars maybe it will end up costing a couple hundred thousand dollars, but if you plan ahead of time and do it and you make sure you're sort of getting all the points that you need we just thought it was important for the cutting edge of what 21st century tenants are going to want in their space we wanted to achieve this at 425 as well.

LK: Are you optimistic for midtown east?

RL: New York City is a very old city as you talked about the average age of an office buildings about 84 years old we're older than London we’re older than Paris we're older certainly than all the Middle Eastern and Asian cities, so to compete in the global environment that we're in we need to have modern infrastructure, modern workspaces. The reason why we talked about earlier why the World Trade Center and Hudson Yards are successful is largely to do with new product so New York City really needs us to be competitive and the whole Midtown rezoning concept is a good one, it has to go through a political process, Bloomberg tried to do it through his administration they're trying to get it done now and it will be a good thing for the city. However, buildings don't become vacant overnight so it's not such an easy thing to do so even with the legislation in place it's still going to take a period of time for people to get control of buildings empty them out and redevelop them in terms of what's happening in Midtown what SL Green is doing, what they're proposing at One Vanderbilt is a great thing for the city it's a great thing to invest in new infrastructure here in Midtown which needs it more than anyplace else and also all stuff that's going on with the transportation in Midtown connecting Penn Station to Grand Central by improving the transportation and enabling people to create new product that's what will enable New York City to maintain its status as really the global leader that it needs to be.

LK: Right and attract talent.

RL: Tenants, employers they compete for talent so employers who want to hire the best employees want to be in buildings that speak to their culture and enable them to execute the business plans that they want and it really makes a difference being in your workplace when we go into one of these drab old buildings that have eight foot ceiling heights with not a lot of light and air not a lot of open space it's a very different experience than going into a modern building or one that's been completely revitalized like this one.

LK: Thank you so much for taking the time today to walk through share your story with us explain to us what's going on at 390 Madison, this great project I think we're all going to be looking forward to seeing upon completion at least with walls and windows maybe we'll come back when it's a little bit warmer out, but thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your story with us and telling us a little bit about the projects that you've been working on.

RL: Our pleasure thank you so much have a great day.