Piper Sandler says SL Green still has runway

Midtown’s office comeback tour

Piper Sandler isn’t changing the script on SL Green Realty: the firm reiterated its Overweight rating and kept the $50 price target intact. The bull case is pretty simple — Midtown office space is getting tighter, and Piper thinks that squeeze could keep building over the next five to seven years as supply stays scarce.

Why that matters for your portfolio

If you own office REITs, you know the whole sector has been living through its own identity crisis. Remote work, higher rates, and shaky demand made the category look like it was auditioning for a reboot nobody asked for. So when a big broker says demand is tightening “like it hasn’t in decades,” that’s not just happy talk — it’s a direct argument that SL Green’s core market may finally be catching a tailwind.

But there’s a catch, because there always is

The note comes against a messy backdrop: SL Green’s first quarter was already described as a record period in its nearly 30-year public history, but the company also posted a rough Q1 2026 EPS miss, with earnings per share of -1.2 versus expectations for -0.68. So you’ve got the classic Wall Street split-screen: better long-term setup, uglier near-term numbers.

Big picture

For investors, this is less “everything’s fixed” and more “the office story may be getting less terrible in the exact places SL Green cares about.” If Midtown really keeps tightening, that could be a meaningful setup for rent growth, occupancy, and sentiment — which is a fancy way of saying the office trade might finally be crawling out of the basement.