22 West 27th Street: Office Space for Lease

The floor available at 22 West 27th Street today

One space is on the market in the building through us, and a tenant taking it takes the whole floor rather than a piece of one.

• Entire 7th Floor: 6,000 square feet, $57 per square foot per year, about $28,500 a month, roughly 34 desks

Annual rent at the asking number is $342,000. The 34 desks assume 175 square feet per person, with meeting rooms, phone booths, a pantry and circulation accounted for, and density moves that count further than the plate does: a tight open plan takes about 43 people here, a real perimeter of private offices closer to 27. We publish a floor plan and nine photographs, enough to rule the floor in or out before anyone spends an afternoon on it.

What $57 a foot means here

The four NoMad floors we hold run $57 to $90 with a $62 median, and this one sits at the bottom of that band. Five dollars under the submarket median is about 8 percent, or $30,000 a year on 6,000 feet. Against the $75 citywide median across our book the gap widens to eighteen dollars, roughly 24 percent.

Nearby floors explain most of that discount. 1235 Broadway asks $62 for an entire 4th floor of 9,500 square feet and 1239 Broadway the same $62 for 12,500 feet on the 12th, both larger plates at Broadway addresses, and scale here carries a premium per foot rather than a discount. Outside NoMad the spread runs both ways: 213 West 35th Street holds 6,100 feet in Penn Plaza at $52, while a partial 13th floor of 5,772 feet at 60 East 42nd Street asks $72, close to $90,000 more a year on a floor this size.

Our read is that the floor prices a little under market for NoMad and clearly under the city, with the discount bought by size and a side street rather than by anything wrong. Asking rent is a position rather than a price, and taking rents land below sticker often enough that $57 belongs at the start of the negotiation.

The submarket around the building

Transit at the door reads N/R/W, 6, F/M at 23rd and 28th. NoMad's stock is prewar and runs to boutique full floors rather than towers, and the neighborhood filled in as Flatiron ran out of room, which is why Series A through C companies keep landing here.

Three other NoMad floors sit on our book. Two are considerably bigger, 9,500 square feet at 1235 Broadway and 12,500 at 1239 Broadway, each asking $62, and the third is the partial 43rd at the Empire State Building, 5,621 square feet at $90, the one tower floor in the submarket. Availability across the four spans 32 to 71 desks, so a company of thirty-odd people now chooses between this floor at $57 and the Empire State Building floor at $90, and teams that need to look wider go to Flatiron, Murray Hill or Chelsea.

How to test this floor before you commit

Walk it with the plan in hand and a headcount you are willing to defend. What matters on site is structural rather than cosmetic: where the core and columns fall, how much of the 6,000 a 34-desk plan can use, how the HVAC is zoned and what after-hours service costs, and what the landlord puts in writing about services. Ask what condition the landlord delivers in, because a floor handed over as it stands and a floor handed over demolished are two different deals at the same rent.

The 6,000 square feet is a rentable figure, which is what you pay on rather than what you occupy. Core, shafts, columns and the loss factor convention sit between the two, and loss factor is a market custom rather than a measurement, so the only honest translation is an architect's test fit that counts desks instead of feet.

Electricity sits on top of the $28,500, typically $2 to $4 per square foot per year, another $1,000 to $2,000 a month on this floor. Cleaning may or may not be inside the base. Real estate tax and operating escalations compound over a term, and a cap on them is usually worth more than an extra month of free rent.

Security is the other lever worth arguing: the size of the letter of credit, whether it burns down as the term runs, and whether a good guy guarantee bounds the exposure. Landlords fund improvement allowance and free rent against length, so five years buys concessions three will not, and filing with the Department of Buildings is what sets a construction calendar, which argues for drawing while the lease is still open.

How we work on this floor

We are tenant-side only. Nothing on our book is a landlord agency, so what we tell you about the 7th floor is not written for two audiences, and we publish the rent because keeping it behind a phone call costs you a week.

Tours we arrange directly, usually within a few days, and we walk the floor with you rather than handing over a key card. If it holds up, lease negotiation and buildout sit with the same team, so design runs alongside terms. A furnished floor can be occupied two to four weeks after signing, a custom fit-out ten to sixteen. Across New York we have delivered 300+ office buildouts over 2M+ square feet.