29 West 17th Street: Office Space for Lease

The one floor on our book here

One suite sits on our book at this address, a partial seventh floor rather than a whole-floor take.

• Size and price: 2,500 square feet at $60 per square foot per year, about $12,500 a month before electric.
• Headcount: roughly 14 desks at the 175 square feet per person we plan against, leaving room for meeting rooms and a pantry. A denser open plan takes 18, private offices closer to 11.
• Condition and term: furnished, wired and plug and play, with hardwood floors and exposed ceilings, on a sublease running through September 2027.

Our file holds a floor plan and a Matterport walkthrough, both sent before anyone visits. Furnished changes the arithmetic at this size, because fourteen people who take the floor as it stands spend nothing on a fit-out, where the same team on a raw floor faces ten to sixteen weeks of design, permitting and construction, funded before the first day of occupancy.

Reading the $60

Union Square prices near the top of our book: the three floors we represent there run $60 to $115 per square foot per year, median $88, about 17% above the median across our New York availability. This suite anchors the bottom.

Against the $75 citywide median, $60 sits $15 under, 20%. Against the Union Square median of $87.50, the unrounded form of the $88 quoted above, the gap is a different order, since 2,500 square feet at that median would ask $218,750 a year where this floor asks $150,000, $68,750 apart on identical footage. Per seat this floor is close to $893 a month across fourteen desks.

It prices low for the area, and the reason is legible rather than suspicious. A sublease with a year left cannot offer what a direct lease offers, and the discount is the compensation: no improvement allowance behind a term this short, free rent in days rather than months, the space as it stands. Read $60 as the price of twelve furnished months at a good address, not as evidence that direct space here trades near it.

The submarket around the building

Transit for this submarket reads 4/5/6, N/Q/R/W, L all at 14th Street, and we will claim nothing further about the walk from this door. That convergence is the widest catchment below 42nd Street, which puts Brooklyn's engineering talent one stop away and keeps NYU close enough to matter for hiring. Stock here runs to boutique prewar north of the park and along Broadway and Park Avenue South, big-windowed floors that go to one tenant at a time, so the companies that land here are usually smaller teams with a preference about character.

Little comes to market at once in a submarket this tight. Our three Union Square floors are this one, Suite 202 at 900 Broadway at 4,000 feet and $115, and the entire second floor at 836 Broadway at 13,754 feet with rent on request, so this is the only floor we hold in the neighborhood for a team of fourteen. Widen the radius by a few stops and the same $60 buys 2,937 feet at 153 West 27th Street in Chelsea or 2,624 feet at 45 Broadway in FiDi, more room for the money and neither of them Union Square.

What a tour and the documents have to settle

Rentable area in New York folds in a share of common space rather than the floor a tenant occupies, so 2,500 is not the number that gets walked. Loss factors of 15-25% are ordinary, putting usable area between 1,875 and 2,125 feet, and across fourteen desks that spread decides whether the layout keeps its meeting room. On a sublease the figure is inherited from the prime lease rather than measured fresh.

• What conveys: furnished and plug and play stay marketing words until a schedule names the desks, chairs, conference equipment and cabling that remain, and who owns them at expiry.
• What the rent excludes: electric commonly adds $2 to $4 per square foot per year, submetered or on a formula, while cleaning, after-hours HVAC and freight access carry their own treatment.
• The partial floor: who else sits on the seventh, whether the demising line and corridor are built or still drawn, and how the restrooms and any shared pantry work.

The prime lease governs the sublease beneath it, so both documents get read together. September 2027 is a year out, which makes the opening questions whether the sublandlord's own term extends past that date, whether ownership will discuss a direct deal when it lapses, and how long consent takes, since it is a condition of occupancy and not a formality. Security, a good guy guarantee, escalations and the surrender clause sit behind those answers.

How we work on this floor

We act for tenants and for nobody else. Nobody at this address pays us, which is why the $60 sits on this page in plain view instead of behind a form, and why the one-year horizon is in our opening lines rather than a footnote.

A tour can usually be arranged inside the same week. We read the prime lease next to the sublease and say plainly what September 2027 does to a headcount plan that expects to grow. From there we run the letter of intent and the negotiation, and if a longer commitment is the better answer the rest of Union Square goes beside this floor. Furnished space can be occupied two to four weeks after signing, and the 300+ buildouts and 2M+ square feet behind us matter more on the move after this one than on a plug-and-play year.