C&W cancels deal to lease 100 Church.

A top Cushman & Wakefield brokerage team will no longer be handling the agency assignment for 100 Church Street, a building that holds one of the largest remaining contiguous spaces in Lower Manhattan but has remained conspicuously vacant despite the recent uptick in leasing activity downtown.

C&W's departure is the latest sign of uncertainty that has surrounded efforts to fill the property's roughly 600,000 s/f of available space. In November of 2005, a group of tenants from the toy industry who had collectively taken roughly 400,000 s/f abruptly backed out of the deal, which had been brokered by C&W. While internal fractures between the tenants were said to be a leading factor in the deal's demise, rumors persisted that many of the tenants also had concerns with 100 Church's landlord.

Indeed, many experts say that 100 Church's leasing struggles are due in part to the reputation of its owner, the Sapir Organization, who was sued on repeated occasions in recent years by major Manhattan real estate services firms, including CB Richard Ellis and Newmark Knight Frank, over unpaid commissions. In addition to the past occasions in which it alienated the brokerage community, some downtown brokers say that the Sapir Organization has also failed to provide the amenities at 100 Church that would be attractive to the kind of institutional tenants that are trolling the market for large spaces.

"They just don't seem like a stable landlord and tenants sense that," said a broker who does deals downtown but would only speak on condition of anonymity.

The firm, which was founded by Russian oil magnate, Tamir Sapir, seemed like it was taking steps to repair both its own and the building's tarnished image when last year it hired a C&W team led by top gun broker, Mitchell Konsker, to handle 100 Church's leasing. Konsker, in many ways, became the face of what seemed to be a coordinated turnaround, trumpeting a multimillion-dollar renovation that the Sapir Organization had planned for the 1 million s/f building and assuring that all commissions were being held in escrow, a common method used in the industry to ensure that a tenant's broker will get their commission.

The firm also changed its name from Zar Realty to the Sapir Organization and Tamir's son, Alex Sapir, was named its new president. According to the younger Sapir in an interview not long after his appointment, Tamir had retired to philanthropic work and personal real estate projects unrelated to the firm's activities. But old habits have a way of dying hard. The firm announced in recent weeks the installation of the world's largest collection of Swarovski Crystal chandeliers in 100 Church's lobby.

But some brokers say that the improvement pales to the renovation that the Sapir Organization promised it would conduct and that the building would likely need to compete with the millions of square feet of new office space that is being constructed just a block away at the World Trade Center site.