5 Bryant Park: Office Space for Lease

The floor available at 5 Bryant Park today

One space is on the market in the building through us, and it is a full floor rather than a piece of one: the entire 33rd, one level below the penthouse, 7,500 square feet. The $96 asking rent is $720,000 a year and $60,000 a month before electricity. The floor comes furnished, with hardwood floors, and our record has it available through March 2028.

• Entire 33rd Floor: 7,500 square feet, $96 per square foot per year, about $60,000 a month, roughly 43 desks, furnished

Forty-three desks is the planning figure at 175 square feet per person, which leaves room for meeting rooms, phone booths, a pantry and circulation. A tight open layout takes about 54 people in the same footprint, a real perimeter of private offices closer to 33. Per seat at the asking number the floor runs near $16,700 a year, about $1,400 a month per person, which settles a budget argument faster than dollars per square foot does.

What $96 a foot means here

The Bryant Park median on our book is also $96, because this floor is the only Bryant Park availability we carry, so treat that median as a description of this space rather than a check on it. The citywide comparison is the honest one. Across everything we represent in New York the median asking rent is $75 per square foot per year, so $96 sits $21 above the middle of our book, about 28 percent higher.

Comparable floors we hold at similar size make the spread concrete. A partial 21st at 520 Madison Avenue, 7,092 square feet, asks $125, near $73,900 a month. An entire 9th at 104 West 27th Street in Chelsea, 7,047 square feet, asks $59, near $34,600. A partial 32nd at 32 Old Slip downtown, 6,997 square feet, asks $64, near $37,300. Same rough footprint, and the monthly cost more than doubles across the set.

Condition earns part of the premium: a furnished floor with hardwood already down skips the furniture budget and most of the buildout calendar, which buys back time as well as fit-out dollars. Where $96 actually settles is a question for the negotiation. Asking rent remains a position, and taking rents land under sticker often enough that this number belongs at the start of the conversation.

The submarket around the building

Transit for the submarket is B/D/F/M, 7, N/Q/R/W at 42nd, and a commute test from where your people actually live is worth running before the tour rather than after it.

The tenants who sit around the park are law firms, funds and media companies paying for the address as much as for the floor plate. An office here is part of the pitch, to clients and to senior hires who expect a view. A company that needs none of that is better served in a cheaper submarket, as the Chelsea floor above shows at nearly forty percent less per foot.

Neighboring submarkets on our book are Midtown, Grand Central and Times Square, and since this is the only floor we carry inside Bryant Park, a search that starts here widens into those three. Midtown holds most of our similar sized inventory, including an entire 10th floor of 8,230 square feet at 45 West 45th Street with rent quoted on request.

How to test this floor before you commit

A tour should settle what a listing sheet cannot. Walk the floor at the hour your team actually works, since light, noise and the way the plate reads when it is full of people are exactly what photographs flatten. Sit in the furniture rather than looking at it, since furnished only helps if it matches how your people work. Confirm the building's standard HVAC hours and what running past them costs.

Ask for the usable area, not only the rentable 7,500. New York quotes rentable square feet, which carries a share of building common areas, and the loss factor commonly runs 15-25% on a full floor. On 7,500 rentable feet, the gap between a 15 percent factor and a 25 percent one is close to a thousand usable feet, a conference room and two offices. Have an architect measure the plate before signing.

The $96 is a base number. Electric is generally submetered and billed on top, commonly $2 to $4 per square foot a year, which is $15,000 to $30,000 annually here, and cleaning may or may not sit in base rent. Escalations and tax escalations over a base year ride above the headline for the whole term. What decides the real cost is negotiable: free rent at the front, an improvement allowance, a cap on escalations, the amount and form of security, whether a letter of credit or a good guy guarantee carries the landlord's risk, and the restoration clause.

How we work on this floor

Nomad works one side of the table. We represent tenants and never landlords, so no floor we point you toward is a floor we are also paid to fill, and we publish every rent we hold instead of making you ask.

We can arrange a tour of the 33rd floor and bring the comparison set with us: the Midtown and downtown floors at the same size, what each costs a month, and what each needs in buildout time. If the conclusion is that Bryant Park is not worth $21 a foot over the citywide middle, that is a good outcome reached before the letter of intent rather than after.