151 West 26th Street: Office Space for Lease

The two floors available here today

Two spaces sit on our book in this building, and they are not two sizes of the same product.

• 12th Floor Penthouse: 17,610 square feet, $56 per square foot per year, about $82,180 a month, roughly 101 desks at 175 square feet per person. Our record lists a conference room and a pantry.
• Partial 10th Floor: 9,000 square feet, $64 per square foot per year, about $48,000 a month, roughly 51 desks on the same standard. Hardwood floors, exposed ceilings, exposed brick and views, plus a published floor plan, six photographs and a Matterport walkthrough.

At 17,610 square feet the penthouse is the second largest floor on our entire Chelsea list, which runs 2,937 to 18,668 square feet, so a team approaching a hundred people has few candidates in this corridor. The 9,000 foot floor suits about fifty, and being a partial floor it has a neighbor, which makes the demising line an early question.

What the two asking rents mean

Chelsea on our book runs $44 to $64 per square foot per year with a median of $56, about 22% under the city. The penthouse at $56 prices exactly at that median and sixteen under the $75 citywide median across our book, a low number for a floor of this size. The partial 10th at $64 does the opposite: it ties the top of the published Chelsea range, and even there it lands eight dollars under the city.

An eight dollar spread inside one address deserves an explanation, and on 9,000 square feet it is $72,000 a year. A gap like that usually tracks condition and what is already built, and our two records differ exactly there.

What the same money buys nearby matters more than either median. Our entire 7th floor at 127 West 26th Street is 9,500 square feet at $50, which annualizes to $475,000 against $576,000 for the 9,000 feet here, so about a hundred thousand dollars a year separates two floors of nearly identical size one street apart. Neither figure here is a taking rent, since free months, improvement dollars and escalation caps close most of the distance between an ask and a signature.

The submarket around the building

Our transit line for Chelsea reads A/C/E, 1, F/M at 14th and 23rd, which is the whole of what we will claim about the commute. Walk it from whichever of those your team rides.

The companies taking these floors are tech, media and design teams that want a room of their own instead of a numbered suite inside a tower, which is what the loft corridor in the mid-20s was converted to produce. Flatiron, Meatpacking and Hudson Yards sit adjacent.

If neither size fits, the rest of our Chelsea list is within a few blocks: 275 Seventh Avenue's entire 24th floor, 18,668 square feet at $63; 127 West 26th Street's entire 7th, 9,500 at $50; 104 West 27th Street's entire 9th, 7,047 at $59; and two small floors at 153 West 27th Street, 2,978 at $44 and 2,937 at $60.

How to evaluate either floor

A tour settles what a listing cannot, and with both spaces in one building one visit covers it. Go at the hour your team actually works and see where the light lands then, and treat the 10th floor's exposed ceiling as a construction condition rather than a finish, since lighting, sprinkler heads, ductwork and cabling all run in view.

Both square footages are rentable numbers, and rentable is a leasing convention rather than a measurement of the room you occupy. Loss factors in New York commonly run 15-25%, which leaves the penthouse at roughly 13,200 to 15,000 usable feet, or about $66 to $75 for every foot you can put a desk on, and the 10th at 6,750 to 7,650 usable, or about $75 to $85. Ask how each was measured, then test it with a fit plan.

Rent is not occupancy cost. Electricity is billed on top and commonly adds $2 to $4 per square foot per year, cleaning may or may not be included, and tax and operating escalations will appear in some form, where base years matter more than percentages.

Term drives the rest, since a landlord funding a buildout wants years to amortize it, and five year and ten year deals on the same floor carry different free rent, allowances and restoration obligations. Expect to negotiate the security amount and whether it is cash or a letter of credit, a good guy guarantee, a cap on the escalation, and the after-hours HVAC rate. On a floor of 17,610 square feet the improvement allowance is the largest number in the deal after the rent itself.

How Nomad works on this building

Nomad is tenant-side only. We do not represent this ownership or any other, which is why both asking rents sit on this page in plain view rather than behind a form, and why our read on whether $64 is defensible can be unflattering to the listing.

We can arrange the tour, usually inside the same week, and put both floors beside the other five Chelsea options so the comparison is real. We have run 300+ office buildouts in New York, so when the talk turns to what a fit-out costs on either plate, that is our own construction experience answering.