520 Madison Avenue: Office Space for Lease

The one floor available here

One space is on the market in the building through us, a partial floor rather than a whole plate. The partial 21st measures 7,092 rentable square feet and asks $125 per square foot per year, which is $886,500 a year and about $73,875 a month before electricity. At the 175 square feet per person we plan against, which already carries meeting rooms and circulation, it seats roughly 41 people; a denser open plan takes about 51, private offices closer to 32.

• Floor: partial 21st, 7,092 sq ft
• Asking rent: $125 per square foot per year
• Approximate monthly: $73,875 before electricity
• Seats about: 41 people at 175 sq ft each

The floor reaches us described as a high-end trading layout: 44 workstations, three private offices or meeting rooms, two conference rooms, an eat-in pantry and a reception area. The installed count of 44 sits above the 41 our density figure produces, so a team of 41 would sit comfortably. A floor plan is published with the photographs, worth reading against your own headcount before a tour.

What $125 a foot means in this market

The four Midtown floors we hold run $79 to $130 per square foot around a median of $125, so this one asks level with the submarket median and about 67% above the $75 citywide median. It is the smallest floor we publish in Midtown and, five dollars under the partial 40th at 277 Park Avenue, very close to the dearest, so the premium has to be earned by the installation and the address.

Total dollars read more clearly than dollars per foot. The entire 9th at 104 West 27th Street runs 7,047 square feet, within fifty square feet of this floor, and asks $59 in Chelsea, about $34,650 a month, under half the monthly here. The entire 26th at 1700 Broadway asks $79 on 13,266 square feet, buying 87% more room for roughly 18% more a year.

What a tenant pays is the taking rent rather than the asking rent, and at this level the concession package does most of the work. Free rent, an improvement allowance, an escalation cap and a sensible deposit move five-year economics further than a few dollars off the face number, and an installation you can occupy as built is capital you never spend.

The submarket around the building

The transit here is nearly every line, with Grand Central and Penn within reach. For a firm hiring across the boroughs and the suburbs at once, that reach is the practical argument for the address: no single commute becomes the reason a candidate turns down an offer.

Midtown is Manhattan's corporate core and carries the deepest supply of large, efficient full floors in the city, so the companies that land here have usually outgrown the boutique buildings to the south or work with clients who expect the address. A client-facing business that wants reception and conference rooms on the same floor as its desks is the natural occupant here.

Our Midtown book holds four floors, 7,092 to 19,097 square feet, priced $79 to $130, with the entire 10th at 45 West 45th Street carrying no published rent. Bryant Park, Grand Central and Penn Plaza sit alongside.

How to evaluate this floor properly

A tour should establish four things: what condition the installation is genuinely in and how much of it you would keep, whether the trading-floor arrangement suits how your team works or would have to be pulled apart, what the light and noise are like at the hour you would actually work, and who else sits on the floor, since a partial plate means a shared lobby.

Ask for the rentable and usable measurements in writing. The 7,092 is a rentable number, as nearly every quoted New York figure is, and the area a carpet plan can hold will be smaller by the building's loss factor. A partial floor usually carries a heavier loss factor than a full-floor tenancy, since you pay a share of the common corridor and lobby, and at $125 a foot every point of it is real money.

The $125 buys occupancy and very little else. Electricity is normally billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot a year, roughly $1,200 to $2,400 a month here, with cleaning, after-hours HVAC, the tax escalation base year and the porter wage formula in the same conversation. Free rent, the improvement allowance, the escalation cap, the security, the good guy guarantee and the restoration clause decide the real cost across a term. On a floor already built out, press on whether the furniture conveys with the lease.

How Nomad works on this one

We represent tenants only. Because we never list space on behalf of landlords, there is no version of this transaction in which we are paid to defend the $125. It is published here because it is the one we were handed.

On this floor that means arranging the tour, pulling the landlord's measurement, running a test fit against your headcount, and carrying the letter of intent and the lease to signature. Having delivered 300+ office buildouts across more than two million square feet in New York, we can tell you quickly whether an installation like this one is worth keeping, which at this rent decides the deal.