137 East 25th Street: Office Space for Lease

What is available in the building right now

One floor is on the market here through us, and it is a large plate by the standards of this neighborhood. The sixth floor measures 8,308 square feet and asks $43 per square foot per year, which comes to $357,244 annually and about $29,770 a month before electricity. At the 175 square feet per person we use for planning, a figure that already allows for meeting rooms, phone booths and circulation, it seats roughly 47 people; a denser open plan takes it to about 59, and a layout carved into private offices settles closer to 37.

• Floor: 6th, 8,308 sq ft
• Asking rent: $43 per square foot per year
• Approximate monthly: $29,770
• Seats about: 47 people at 175 sq ft each

This is the only availability we hold in the building, so a team needing materially less than 8,308 square feet is better served by the smaller Flatiron floors on our book. No floor plan is published, and we request the current one from the landlord's agent before a tour.

What $43 a foot means in this submarket

Flatiron runs from the cheapest floor on our book to a $115 penthouse, $43 to $115 per square foot around a median of $72, and this floor sits at the bottom of it. It is the cheapest of the six we hold there, roughly 40% under the submarket median, and because Flatiron's $72 median now sits just under the $75 citywide one, the gap to the city runs a little wider at about 43%.

The comparison that decides anything is total dollars rather than dollars per foot. The ninth floor at 276 Fifth Avenue asks $52 on 5,500 square feet, about $23,833 a month, so this floor buys 51% more space for 25% more annual rent. The partial fourth floor at 54 West 21st Street asks $72 on 3,960 square feet and lands within a hundred dollars a month of that same figure. The real choice is a small floor at a Flatiron price or a full plate at this one.

A low asking rent is not a cheap deal. Taking rent is what gets signed once concessions have been argued, and a floor asking $43 with no package can cost more across five years than one asking $52 with four months free and a serious allowance. Where a floor prices under its submarket, the reason is usually condition or layout, which is what the tour is for.

The neighborhood around the building

The floor sits on the east side of the Flatiron cluster, the quieter and better-value edge of it, with N/Q/R/W, 4/5/6, F/M, L at 14th and 23rd. Those lines reach across the boroughs, and a hiring radius that wide is worth real money to a company adding headcount in New York.

Tenants who take floors like this tend to be single companies holding a whole plate and branding their own elevator lobby rather than firms splitting a corridor, and Flatiron has been the center of the city's venture-backed tech cluster since the Silicon Alley days. Our book holds six Flatiron floors at the moment, 2,940 to 10,562 square feet, roughly 17 to 60 desks. NoMad, Union Square and Chelsea sit alongside, and we show floors across all four when size rather than address is the constraint.

How to evaluate this floor properly

A tour should settle four things: the condition the space is genuinely in and the work it needs, how the plate divides against your headcount, what the light and the noise are like at the hour you would be working, and who occupies the rest of the building. Bring the seating plan you intend to use, because 8,308 square feet reads very differently to a team of forty than to one that wants fifteen private offices.

Ask for the rentable versus usable measurement in writing. The 8,308 is a rentable figure, as almost every quoted number in New York is, and the usable area a carpet plan can hold will be smaller by the building's loss factor. A full-floor tenancy normally carries a lighter loss factor than a multi-tenant floor, but only a test fit against the real plan tells you what you are buying, and it turns a headcount argument into a drawing before anyone signs.

The $43 buys occupancy, not operations. Electricity is typically billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot a year, roughly $1,400 to $2,800 a month on a floor this size, and cleaning, after-hours HVAC, the tax escalation base year and the porter wage formula belong in the same conversation. The terms that move real cost are free rent, the improvement allowance, the escalation cap, the amount and form of security, the good guy guarantee and the restoration obligation at the end.

How Nomad works on this one

We represent tenants only. Because we do not list space for landlords, there is no version of this transaction in which we are paid to defend the asking rent, and the $43 on this page is the number we were given rather than one we are selling.

We can arrange the tour, pull the current plan and measurement from the landlord's agent, run the test fit against your headcount, and carry the letter of intent and the lease to signature. Having delivered 300+ office buildouts across more than two million square feet in New York, we can price the work this floor needs while the argument over who pays for it is still open.