500 Fifth Avenue: Office Space for Lease

The floor available at 500 Fifth Avenue today

One space sits on our book in this building, and it is the whole of the fifty-fifth rather than a piece of one, which takes the shared landing and the demising line out of the conversation.

• Entire 55th Floor: 6,928 rentable square feet at $125 per square foot per year, $866,000 annually, about $72,167 a month before electricity, roughly 40 desks.

Forty desks is the planning figure at 175 square feet a person, which leaves room for meeting rooms, phone rooms, a pantry and circulation. Push the layout tight and open and the same plate takes close to 49; ring the perimeter with offices and it falls nearer 31. Per seat the floor runs about $21,650 a year, near $1,804 a month a head, which settles a budget argument faster than dollars per foot does.

Our record describes outstanding natural light and panoramic views with immediate occupancy, and views are the only amenity flagged against it. It says nothing about the condition of the installation, whether anything stays, or how the plate is divided today. A floor plan sits on the space page, but the state of the floor is a question for the tour.

What $125 a foot buys, and what it costs

Bryant Park is the expensive end of our book and this floor is the expensive end of Bryant Park. Four floors carry the submarket, asking $65 to $125 with a median of $96, so $125 defines the ceiling of that range and sits roughly 30 percent above its middle.

Against the whole book the spread widens. The median across the 49 floors we represent in eleven New York submarkets is $75, in a book running $43 to $200, so this floor asks $50 over the middle, about 67 percent higher. On 6,928 square feet that is $346,400 a year, close to $1.73 million across a five year term.

Floors of the same rough size make it concrete. A partial 21st at 520 Madison Avenue, 7,092 feet, asks the identical $125, about $73,875 a month. A partial 32nd at 32 Old Slip downtown, 6,997 feet, asks $64, about $37,317, near half. Inside Bryant Park the entire 33rd at 5 Bryant Park is 7,500 feet at $96, about $60,000 and furnished, which is 572 square feet more area for $12,167 a month less. All of those are asking rents, and taking rents land under sticker often enough that $125 belongs at the opening of a negotiation.

The submarket around the building

Transit for Bryant Park reads B/D/F/M, 7, N/Q/R/W at 42nd, which describes the submarket rather than any particular door. Run the commute from where your people actually live before the tour, not after.

We hold four floors in these blocks, 4,109 to 17,296 square feet, roughly 23 to 99 desks, asking $65 to $125, and all four are entire floors. Two sit at 1450 Broadway, one at 5 Bryant Park, this one here, so a tenant anchored on this address can see the submarket in an afternoon. Neighboring submarkets on our book are Midtown, Grand Central and Times Square.

The listing makes the location argument itself, calling the space conveniently located next to the New York Public Library and Bryant Park. Companies pay at this level when the office does work for them, in front of clients and senior candidates who expect a view. A business that sells over video is spending $50 a foot above the middle of our book on an amenity it will not use, and the honest answer for that team is the cheaper end of Bryant Park or a different submarket.

How to test the 55th floor before you commit

The 6,928 is rentable, not usable. New York quotes rentable feet, which carry a share of the building's common areas, and loss factor on a full floor commonly runs 15-25%. That leaves about 5,889 usable feet at the good end and 5,196 at the bad, a swing of 693 feet, which is a conference room and two offices. Have an architect measure the plate and run a test fit before the letter of intent.

Light and views are the claim this listing rests on, so test them at the hour your team actually works and ask which exposures the floor holds. Establish the condition of the installation in writing: what is standing today, what ownership will demolish, what stays, and what delivery condition backs the immediate occupancy the record promises. Confirm HVAC hours and after-hours cost, freight rules for the move-in, and where the telecom riser lands. If the floor needs work, the DOB filing and the construction calendar sit in front of your occupancy date, not behind it.

The $125 is a base number, and the costs just outside it are where budgets break. Electric is normally submetered or billed as an inclusion at $2 to $4 per square foot a year, $13,856 to $27,712 here, and cleaning may or may not sit inside base rent. Tax escalations charge your share of increases over a base year, operating escalations arrive as a pass-through or a porter's wage formula, and base rent itself steps 2.5% to 3% annually. What moves the effective number is all negotiable: free rent, an improvement allowance quoted per rentable foot, a cap on escalations, the form of the security, whether a letter of credit or a good guy guarantee carries the landlord's risk, and the restoration clause at the end of the term.

How Nomad works on this floor

We sit on one side of the table. Nomad represents tenants and never landlords, so no floor we walk you through is one we are also paid to fill, and we publish the asking rent on every listing we hold.

A tour of the 55th can usually be arranged inside the same week, and we bring the comparison set with us: the other three Bryant Park floors, the same footprint at $125 in Midtown, the same footprint at $64 downtown, each with its monthly number attached. If this address is not worth $50 a foot over the middle of our book, that is a better conclusion to reach standing in the space than eighteen months into a lease. If it is worth it, we run the letter of intent, the lease and the buildout, with 300+ buildouts across 2M+ square feet behind the arithmetic.