276 Fifth Avenue: Office Space for Lease

What is available in the building right now

One floor is on the market here through us. The ninth measures 5,500 square feet and asks $52 per square foot per year, which is $286,000 annually and about $23,833 a month before electricity. At the 175 square feet per person we plan against, a figure that already leaves room for meeting rooms, phone booths and circulation, it seats roughly 31 people; a denser open plan takes it to about 39, and a layout carved into private offices settles closer to 24.

• Floor: 9th, 5,500 sq ft
• Asking rent: $52 per square foot per year
• Approximate monthly: $23,833
• Seats about: 31 people at 175 sq ft each

This is the only availability we hold in the building, so a team needing much less or much more is better served by the wider Flatiron list, which runs 2,940 to 10,562 square feet. The record behind this floor gives us the size, the rent, the floor and the submarket. It carries no floor plan, no amenity list and no written description of the space, and we close that gap by asking the landlord's agent for the current plan and the measurement before anyone walks it.

We would rather say that plainly than describe a floor we have not stood in. What the paperwork supports is the arithmetic set out below, and everything else, the condition, the layout as built, the light at four in the afternoon, is what a tour is for. The two arrive in that order, and the arithmetic is strong enough on its own to justify the hour.

What $52 a foot means in this submarket

Flatiron runs $43 to $115 per square foot on our book around a median of $72, and $52 sits near the bottom of that range, second cheapest of the six floors we hold there. Against the $75 citywide median it is 31% below, and against Flatiron's own median of $72 it is 28% below, in a submarket that now prices a few percent under the city.

Dollars per foot is the wrong unit for the actual decision, and the monthly figures make the point faster. The partial fourth floor at 54 West 21st Street asks $72 on 3,960 square feet, about $23,760 a month, landing within a hundred dollars of this floor for 1,540 fewer square feet. The partial ninth at 900 Broadway is smaller again at 2,940 square feet and $92, roughly $22,540 a month, so a company weighing those two against this one is choosing between about 31 desks and about 17 for nearly identical rent. At the top of the submarket, the penthouse at 30 West 21st Street is nearly this size at 5,250 square feet and asks $115, more than twice the annual rent. The sixth floor at 137 East 25th Street goes the other way, $43 on 8,308 square feet and about $29,770 a month, a bigger plate for roughly a quarter more.

The sixth Flatiron floor on our book carries no published asking rent at all, the 10,562 square foot combination of the ninth and tenth at 30 West 21st Street, and that absence is itself instructive: a number on a page and a number a landlord will sign are different things, and some landlords decline to publish the first one precisely because they intend to negotiate the second.

Pricing under the submarket median does not by itself make a deal cheap. Asking rent starts the conversation and taking rent is what gets signed, and $52 with no concession package can cost more over five years than a higher number carrying months of free rent and a serious improvement allowance. Run both offers as a net effective number over the full term before you decide which one is the discount. Where a floor sits below its neighbors there is usually a reason, and the reason is usually visible on a walkthrough, so treat the gap as a question to put to the landlord's agent rather than a conclusion to celebrate.

The submarket around the building

Flatiron is where this floor competes, and the submarket is a great deal easier to describe with confidence than the building is. Transit reads N/Q/R/W, 4/5/6, F/M, L at 14th and 23rd, which is the practical argument for being here at all: a hiring radius that pulls from all five boroughs and New Jersey is worth real money to a company adding staff, and it takes the commute objection out of most offer conversations. NoMad, Union Square and Chelsea sit alongside, and we show all four when the constraint is size and budget rather than address.

Our Flatiron book runs to six floors between 2,940 and 10,562 square feet, roughly 17 to 60 desks, asking $43 to $115 around a median of $72. This floor sits mid-range on size and near the floor on price, which is an unusual pairing and the whole reason it belongs on a shortlist. The submarket has been the center of the city's venture-backed tech cluster since the Silicon Alley days, so the companies you would be bidding against for a floor here tend to be at a stage close to your own, and they move quickly when something is priced under the median.

What we cannot tell you from the record is what the building itself is like. The listing carries no description and no amenity list, so the lobby, the elevators, the window line, the ceiling and the condition of the ninth floor as it stands today all have to come from a walkthrough rather than from us. We are not going to fill that gap with adjectives. Ask us to set the tour, and in the same conversation we will ask the landlord's agent for the plan, the measurement, the tenant mix on the surrounding floors and what the landlord is prepared to spend on the space.

How to evaluate the ninth floor properly

Walk it with the seating plan you actually intend to build, because 5,500 square feet reads one way to thirty people at open benches and another to a team that wants a dozen private offices. A tour should settle the condition the space is genuinely in, how the plate divides against your headcount, what the light and the street noise are like at the hour you would be working, and who else is in the building.

Ask for the rentable versus usable measurement in writing. The 5,500 is a rentable number, as nearly every figure quoted in New York is, and the usable area a carpet plan can hold comes out smaller by whatever loss factor the building applies. A floor let in its entirety normally carries a lighter loss factor than one shared with other tenants, which is among the first things to confirm here rather than assume. Only a test fit on the real plan proves your headcount fits, and at this stage a test fit costs you nothing, because the landlord's architect will usually run one for a tenant who looks close.

The $52 covers occupancy rather than operations. Electricity is normally billed on top at $2-4 per square foot a year, roughly $900 to $1,800 a month at this size, and cleaning scope, after-hours HVAC and the tax escalation base year belong in the same review. What decides the five-year cost is the free rent, the improvement allowance, the escalation cap, the form of the security and the restoration obligation at the end.

Expect the landlord to ask for security in the range of three to eight months, by cash or letter of credit, together with a good guy guarantee that lets you hand back the keys cleanly if the company does not make it. Both are negotiable, and both move with the strength of your financials far more than with the asking rent. If the floor needs work, the sequence is test fit, then a signed lease with the allowance written into it, then DOB filing, then construction, and filing is the step that most often runs longer than anyone planned for. A sublease, where one exists, trades that allowance and that landlord relationship for a shorter term and a space taken as it sits.

How Nomad works on this one

We represent tenants and only tenants. Because we take no listings from landlords, there is no version of this deal in which we are paid to defend the $52.

In practice that means setting the tour, pulling the current plan and measurement from the landlord's agent, running a test fit against your headcount, and carrying the letter of intent and the lease through to signature. With 300+ buildouts and more than two million square feet delivered in New York behind us, we can price the work this floor turns out to need while the question of who pays for it is still open, which is the only moment at which that pricing carries any leverage.

If the ninth floor is wrong once you have stood in it, the same afternoon covers the rest of Flatiron and the three submarkets next to it. None of the process changes. The only thing that changes is which floor we are arguing about.