30 West 21st Street: Office Space for Lease

Both floors on the market now

Two spaces are on the market here through us, at opposite ends of what Flatiron offers. The penthouse floor measures 5,250 square feet and asks $115 per square foot per year, $603,750 annually and about $50,313 a month before electricity. At the 175 square feet per person we plan against it seats roughly 30; open benches take it to 38, private offices down to 23.

• Penthouse floor: 5,250 sq ft, $115 per square foot per year, about $50,313 a month, seats about 30
• Entire 9th and 10th floors: 10,562 sq ft, asking rent not published, seats about 60

The 9th and 10th come together as one 10,562 square foot block, two contiguous full floors and the largest availability our book holds in Flatiron, roughly 60 desks at that density and nearer 47 with private offices. No rent is published against it, and it should not be assumed to track the penthouse. A floor plan exists for the block and none for the penthouse.

What $115 a foot means here

Flatiron runs $43 to $115 per square foot on our book around a median of $72, and the penthouse asks the top of that range: about 53% above the $75 citywide median and about 60% above Flatiron's own, since the submarket now sits a few dollars under the city.

Monthly figures sharpen the comparison. The sixth floor at 137 East 25th Street asks $43 on 8,308 square feet, about $29,770 a month, 3,058 more square feet for roughly 40% less money. The ninth at 276 Fifth Avenue is larger than the penthouse at 5,500 square feet and asks $52, about $23,833, under half. The partial fourth at 54 West 21st Street on the same street asks $72 on 3,960 square feet, about $23,760.

The honest read is that this floor prices high, and not marginally. At the Flatiron median of $72 the same 5,250 feet would run about $378,000 a year, so the ask carries roughly $225,750 of annual premium, and only seven floors on our whole New York book ask more. What earns that premium gets settled on the tour. Concessions, not the asking number, decide the real cost.

The street and the submarket

30 West 21st Street sits in Flatiron, Manhattan, on the same street as 54 West 21st Street, where we hold another floor. Transit reads N/Q/R/W, 4/5/6, F/M, L at 14th and 23rd, a hiring radius across five boroughs and New Jersey inside one ride.

Flatiron has been the center of New York's venture-backed tech scene since the Silicon Alley years, and companies leave the submarket reluctantly, usually only when they need a floor bigger than the neighborhood builds. What our records fix about these two spaces is size and configuration: both come to market as whole floors rather than partial plates, and the 9th and 10th are contiguous.

Our book holds six Flatiron floors, 2,940 to 10,562 square feet and 17 to 60 desks, two of them here at the extremes of size and price. NoMad, Union Square and Chelsea sit alongside.

How to evaluate either floor

Tour with the seating plan you actually intend to build, because 5,250 square feet reads one way to thirty people at open benches and another to a team that wants a dozen private offices. A walk-through should settle the real condition of the space, how the plate divides against your headcount, and what the building allows for construction access and delivery hours. On the penthouse, establish what the top floor delivers that the floors below do not.

Ask for the rentable and the usable measurements in writing. Both 5,250 and 10,562 are rentable figures, as nearly every number quoted in New York is, and usable area comes out smaller by whatever loss factor applies. On a two-floor block that question lands twice. Contiguous is not the same as connected, so have the tour establish how the two levels join; a connecting stair is tenant work with a DOB filing behind it.

Rent covers occupancy and not operations. Electricity is billed on top at $2-4 per square foot a year, roughly $875 to $1,750 a month on the penthouse, and cleaning scope, the after-hours HVAC rate and the escalation base year belong in the same review. The five-year cost turns on the escalation cap, who controls the improvement work, the security, the good guy guarantee, the restoration obligation at exit, and whether the deal is direct or a sublease.

How we work on it

We represent tenants and only tenants. We take no listings from landlords, so there is no version of this deal in which we are paid to defend the $115, and we publish what every floor asks.

That means arranging the tour, pulling the plan and measurement from the landlord's agent, getting a number on the 9th and 10th before you budget around them, running a test fit, and carrying the lease to signature. With 300+ buildouts behind us, we can price the work a floor needs while who pays for it is still open.