213 West 35th Street: Office Space for Lease

What is on our book here today

Two floors are available, stacked one above the other.

• 11th Floor: 6,100 square feet, $52 per square foot per year, about $26,433 a month, roughly 35 desks at 175 square feet per person. It is listed with a terrace, a conference room and furniture in place, and we hold a walkthrough tour of it.
• 10th Floor: 5,250 square feet, $50 per square foot per year, about $21,875 a month, roughly 30 desks on the same standard. Nothing is listed against it on the amenity side, which usually points to a floor offered closer to as-is.

Because the two are neighbors in the stack, a company of about 65 people could take both for 11,350 square feet at a blended $51 a foot, near enough $48,308 a month. Neither floor has a plan on our file, so ask ownership for the drawing before anyone lays a team out on it.

Reading the asking rent

Penn Plaza shows a median of $52 on our book, which looks like a market check until you notice how few floors build it: three in the whole submarket, two of them the ones on this page, so the midpoint simply lands on the 11th floor here. Treat it as arithmetic rather than evidence. Against the $75 median across everything we represent in New York, $52 sits about 31% under and $50 about 33% under.

Comparable floors on our own file make the gap concrete. A 6,000 square foot 7th floor at 22 West 27th Street in NoMad asks $57. The 6,350 square foot second floor at 540 Broadway asks $85, which is $539,750 a year against $317,200 for the 11th floor here at nearly the same size, and a penthouse at 30 West 21st Street asks $115 for precisely the 5,250 square feet of the 10th, $603,750 against $262,500.

Both floors price low for the city and at market for the block, and the discount is honest rather than a trap: what you give up against a Flatiron penthouse is address and finish level, not access.

The submarket around the building

The transit we publish for Penn Plaza is 1/2/3, A/C/E, LIRR and NJ Transit, and that is the full extent of what we will claim about the commute. The commuter rail half of it is why tenants come. What the floors themselves are like belongs on a tour rather than in a paragraph, but the companies that choose this district are usually the ones whose people arrive from Long Island, New Jersey or the northern suburbs, where minutes between the train and the desk turn into a hiring argument.

Nearby has to mean somewhere else here. Chelsea, Hudson Yards and Midtown are the adjacent submarkets, and the closest floors we hold at a similar size sit in NoMad and Grand Central between $57 and $90 a foot. Anyone touring here should walk one of those the same afternoon.

How to judge these two floors

Both floors turn on questions a listing cannot settle. On the 11th, pin down what furnished means: an inventory, whether the furniture conveys with the lease, and whether the terrace is exclusive to the floor and inside the measured area. On the 10th it is narrower, being what stands there now and what ownership will build. Ask on both what HVAC costs outside standard hours.

The 6,100 and 5,250 figures are rentable, and rentable is a leasing convention rather than a measurement of your floor. Loss factors in New York commonly run 15-25%, which would leave the 11th somewhere between roughly 4,575 and 5,185 usable square feet, turning $52 into about $61 to $69 per usable foot, and the 10th between 3,938 and 4,463, turning $50 into about $59 to $67. The $75 citywide median is rentable too, so compare like with like. Budget per seat off usable.

Occupancy cost runs longer than rent. Electric is usually billed on top and commonly adds $2 to $4 per square foot a year, and escalations run off a base year whose definition is worth arguing. Free rent, an improvement allowance, the form of the security, the good guy guarantee and the restoration obligation all move what you actually pay. At this rent a fair improvement package beats another dollar off the face rate.

How Nomad works on this building

Nomad works one side of the table. We do not represent this building's ownership, which is why both asking rents sit on this page in plain view instead of behind a form, and why our opinion on whether $50 or $52 is right for your team can be unflattering to the listing.

A tour we can usually arrange inside the same week, and we will put these floors beside the NoMad and Grand Central options rather than on their own. We have run 300+ office buildouts across 2M+ square feet in New York, so what turning the 10th floor into a 30-person office costs and how long it takes is our own record talking.