NEW YORK CITY-Upscale retailers have been outperforming their more popularly priced counterparts at this stage of the recovery, and a similar dynamic appears to be at work in Manhattan’s office market. In the 52 office buildings that are considered trophy properties, the vacancy rate for space above the 25th floor is about 4.2%. That compares with 12.3% in Midtown overall, says Jones Lang LaSalle. It’s also lower than the vacancy rate for base floor space in the same towers.

“With demand increasing, landlords now have some pricing power for these tower floor units,” writes Cynthia Wasserberger, managing director at JLL, in the latest edition of the firm’s hedge fund activity report. She adds that another way to look at the dearth of tower space is the options available to a tenant looking for space in Midtown, still the priciest CBD in the US: while 50% of the tenant’s options will be in class A buildings, only 7.5% will come from tower floors in trophy properties.

Quite a bit of that space has been snapped up lately by financial services tenants. Lazard Ltd. signed a renewal deal at 30 Rockefeller Plaza last week that added 60,000 square feet to its existing 370,000-square-foot space. Another tenant in that sector, Deloitte, signed up for 12 floors totaling 436,000 square feet at the same property in January. Private equity giants Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts and Apollo Global Management both recently renewed for more than 100,000 square feet apiece at the same trophy tower, the Solow Building at 9 W. 57th St. And at the end of 2010, Soci