127 West 26th Street: Office Space for Lease

The one floor available here, and what it runs

One availability sits in our book at this address, and it is the whole seventh floor rather than a carved suite, so the tenant controls the elevator landing, the circulation and the layout without designing around a neighbor. The floor measures 9,500 rentable square feet and asks $50 per square foot per year, so $475,000 annually, or roughly $39,583 a month before electricity, which typically adds $2-4 per square foot per year. Our record on the building is short: entry is gated. Construction and delivery condition are what a tour establishes.

Headcount depends on how the floor gets built. At the 175 square feet per person we plan against, which leaves room for conference rooms, phone booths and a pantry, the space seats about 54. A denser open plan takes it to roughly 68, and real private offices pull it back toward 42. No floor plan is published for this one, so treat 54 as a planning figure and let a test fit turn it into a number you can sign against.

What $50 a foot means next to the market

Chelsea's median asking rent across the 7 spaces we represent there is $59 per square foot per year, range $44-$64. This floor asks $50, roughly 11% under the $56 Chelsea median and third cheapest of the nine floors we carry there. Against the $75 citywide median on our book it is $25 lower, a third below it, and Chelsea already runs around 25% under the city, so the discount compounds.

Floors of similar size on the same blocks tell you more. 151 West 26th Street carries a partial tenth floor at 9,000 square feet asking $64, which is 500 fewer feet for $101,000 more a year. 104 West 27th Street has an entire ninth floor at 7,047 feet asking $59, about $34,648 a month, so the seventh floor here buys 2,453 additional square feet for roughly $4,900 more each month.

That gap is a question for the tour rather than a bargain to assume, because delivery condition, light, the column grid and the age of the systems all sit inside a $50 asking rent.

Chelsea around the building

Transit here reads A/C/E, 1, F/M at 14th and 23rd, which is why teams with people scattered across the boroughs keep landing on these blocks. Chelsea came out of the gallery decades as the default home for tech, media and design companies, and the stock stayed boutique: most buildings run a single tenant per floor, with keyed elevator entry, operable windows and 11-to-13-foot ceilings. Companies choose the neighborhood when they want Flatiron's character with more room left in the budget.

Seven floors sit in our Chelsea book, from 2,937 to 18,668 square feet and 17 to 107 people, so a search starting here need not end here. 151 West 26th Street and 153 West 27th Street each carry two availabilities, 104 West 27th Street holds a full ninth floor a block north, and 275 Seventh Avenue has the largest plate.

How to evaluate the seventh floor

Every square foot in that 9,500 is rentable area, not usable area, and in New York the two are never the same. Rentable adds an allocated share of the building's common space, and no agency audits the loss factor that separates them, so the only honest way to rank this floor against another is to divide the annual rent by the feet you can actually fill. Whole-floor deals usually measure better on that test than partial ones.

A tour is worth the hour only if it comes back with answers. We send clients in with a short list.

• Where the columns land, because the structural grid decides where conference rooms sit long before an architect does, and no drawing we hold settles it.
• Delivery condition: what infrastructure is worth keeping, and what ownership will demolish at its own cost.
• HVAC capacity and age, the after-hours rate, and who pays for supplemental cooling in a server room.
• Freight hours and the loading window, which govern a construction calendar more than rent does.
• Light and street noise at the hour your team actually works, not whenever the tour was booked.

Base rent covers the base and little else. Electricity is usually billed separately, cleaning may or may not be included, escalations run from a base year you negotiate, and a restoration clause prices a term you have not started yet. Real occupancy cost is set by the package around the rent: free rent, the improvement allowance, the escalation cap, the form of security, whether a good guy guarantee replaces a letter of credit, and the renewal rights written in while you still have leverage.

How we work on a floor like this

We represent tenants and nobody else, so no owner in this building is paying us to fill it. That is why the rent is printed on this page rather than held back for a phone call. We can arrange a tour of the seventh floor within a few days, and we will schedule the comparable Chelsea floors the same afternoon so the comparison is real.

From there we run the letter of intent, the lease negotiation, and the buildout if you want it, on the back of 300+ office buildouts delivered across New York. A floor that works as delivered can be occupied two to four weeks after signing; a custom fit-out at this size typically runs 10-16 weeks across design, approvals and construction.