2 Penn Plaza: Office Space for Lease

What is available in the building today

One floor sits on our book here, and it arrives finished rather than raw.

• Partial 17th Floor: 5,070 rentable square feet, $135 per square foot per year, about $57,038 a month and $684,450 a year, rated at 29 desks on the 175 square feet per person standard we plan to. A floor plan is on our file.

Ownership's own description is a room count rather than an adjective, which is the useful kind: one executive office, three further offices, a phone room, a conference room, open seating for 21 workstations, and a reception and lounge area, built new for a team of 20 or more.

Count the seats and the plan holds about 25, four in rooms and 21 in the open, or 203 square feet a head as drawn against the 29 desks the allowance implies. Since a plan exists, run a test fit against your real org chart before anyone gets into an elevator.

Reading the $135

Across the 49 floors we represent in eleven submarkets, asking rents run $43 to $200. This floor is the $135, and only 66 Hudson Boulevard at $200 asks more.

Penn Plaza's median of $52 describes the other two floors we hold there, both at 213 West 35th Street. Against the $75 median across everything we represent in New York, $135 sits about 80% higher, $60 a foot, or $304,200 a year on 5,070 square feet. The same footage at $52 would run $263,640 against $684,450 here, a difference of $420,810 a year and roughly $2.1 million over five years before escalations.

The finished-floor market at about 5,000 square feet runs $115 to $135 on our own book: $115 at 4 World Trade Center in FiDi, about $48,137 a month, and $120 at 60 Charlton Street in SoHo, about $50,030. The Empire State Building's partial 43rd in NoMad, 5,621 square feet of new prebuilt with six windowed offices and two conference rooms, asks $90 and runs about $42,158, which is $14,880 a month less for 551 more feet.

The question is not whether $135 is a lot. It is whether a plan you can occupy immediately is worth $420,810 a year against a floor you would have to draw, file, build and wait for.

The submarket around the building

Transit here is 1/2/3, A/C/E, LIRR and NJ Transit, and that is the entire claim we will make about the commute. The rail half is what brings tenants to the district, because a workforce arriving from Long Island or New Jersey stops changing trains.

The neighborhood as we describe it, around Penn Station and Moynihan Train Hall, newly rebuilt and well priced for its access, holds at district level. What this particular floor feels like at nine in the morning belongs to a tour.

We hold two other floors in the submarket, both at 213 West 35th Street: 5,250 square feet at $50, about $21,875 a month and 30 desks, and 6,100 at $52, about $26,433 and 35 desks, the second listed with a terrace, a conference room and furniture. Walk both the same afternoon, because they are the argument against this floor. Chelsea, Hudson Yards and Midtown are the adjacent submarkets.

How to judge this floor on a tour

The 5,070 is rentable, and rentable in New York folds in common area no tenant lays out. At the 15-25% loss factors common here, the usable footprint falls between roughly 3,803 and 4,310 square feet, turning $135 into about $159 to $180 per usable foot, or 152 to 172 usable feet across the 25 seats drawn. The $75 citywide median is rentable too, so compare like with like.

The ask is not the occupancy cost. Electric is commonly billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot, another $10,000 to $20,000 a year here, cleaning and after-hours HVAC sit outside the number, and escalations run off a base year whose definition deserves an argument in the lease rather than a shrug at the letter of intent.

Prebuilt raises what a listing cannot settle. Establish what conveys and on what inventory, furniture and cabling included, and whether the plan is fixed or ownership will move a wall, since relocating one office turns a delivery date into a design, DOB filing and construction sequence, which is exactly what the premium was meant to buy back. Confirm the delivery condition, whether the deal is direct or a sublease, the term, the letter of credit and the good guy guarantee. Free rent and a work letter move effective cost further than another dollar off the face rate.

How Nomad works on this building

We work one side of the table. We do not represent this building's ownership, which is why the $135 is printed here in plain view rather than behind a form, and why we will say without flinching that only one floor on our book, the partial 53rd at 66 Hudson Boulevard at $200, asks more.

We will not show it to you alone either. A tour we can usually arrange within the week, set beside the two floors at 213 West 35th Street and the prebuilts at similar size elsewhere in the city. Send us your headcount, your hiring plan for the next 18 months and the date you need people sitting down.

We have run 300+ office buildouts across 2M+ square feet in New York, so what it costs and how long it takes to turn a raw 5,000 foot floor into the office this one already is comes from our own records rather than a guess.