Health care law firm leasing 45,000-square-foot space in Garden City

A national health care law firm is relocating from its longtime Great Neck office to a 45,000-square-foot space in Garden City, according to brokers involved in the deal. 

Garfunkel Wild P.C. signed a long-term lease earlier this month to move to a slightly larger space at 900 Stewart Ave., the law firm said Friday. The firm also has offices in New Jersey, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Albany and Florida.

The firm has litigated on behalf of organizations such as Catholic Health Care Services, South Shore University Hospital and NYU Grossman School of Medicine, according to news releases on the firm’s website.

The law firm, which has 140 employees across its six East Coast offices, had been in the market for a few months before choosing the Garden City property, he said.

“The layout in Garden City was ideal,” said Andrew Blustein, chairman of the law firm. “It allows us all to be on one floor, whereas right now we’re on two floors in Great Neck.” 

Blustein said the Great Neck space has “slightly less” space between the two floors they currently occupy than the Garden City location.

The firm plans to move by the end of September when its lease is set to expire, Blustein said. Aon, an insurance business headquartered in London, was the space's previous tenant, according to brokers on the lease deal. 

Blustein declined to say how much the firm would be paying in monthly rent. 

The average asking rent for office space on Long Island is $29.30 per square foot, according to fourth quarter 2024 data from Moody's Analytics.

The Island’s office market had begun to see improvements in its vacancy rate leading up to 2020, but the pandemic largely undid that progress, said Ricardo Rosas, a data scientist with Moody’s.

“After the pandemic, we saw this sharp uptick,” Rosas said.

During the last quarter of 2024, the vacancy rate for Long Island offices was 14.2%, up from 13.6% in the fourth quarter of 2023. The widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work options in the wake of the pandemic has also led some high-profile tenants, such as Capital One and Henry Schein, to reduce their office space locally in recent years.

Twinkle Roy, an economist with Moody’s, said local office tenants have become “hesitant to expand” their spaces while landlords have turned to “tenant retention strategies,” such as offering deals on rent, or funds for improvements to their space.

“It’s a tenants’ market at the end of day," Roy said.

Commercial brokerage firm CBRE facilitated the lease between Garfunkel and the owners of the Stewart Avenue property, Lionstone Capital and JFR Global Investments, both of Brooklyn.

The owners of the property did not respond to requests for comments.

"Garfunkel Wild is one of the most prominent health care law firms and we are thrilled that 900 Stewart Avenue will be their downstate New York future home," Robert Seidenberg, a senior vice president with CBRE's Long Island office, said in a statement.