54 West 21st Street: Office Space for Lease

The one floor on the market now

A single space is available here through us, and it comes furnished rather than raw. The partial fourth floor measures 3,960 square feet and asks $72 per square foot per year, $285,120 annually and about $23,760 a month before electricity. At the 175 square feet per person we plan against it seats roughly 23, or 28 open plan and nearer 18 with private offices.

• Partial 4th Floor: 3,960 sq ft, $72 per square foot per year, about $23,760 a month, seats about 23

What is already installed matters as much as the square footage. The floor carries 36 sit-stand workstations, two large conference rooms, one meeting room, two phone booths and a large eat-in pantry, in an efficient open layout with direct elevator presence. Notice the arithmetic on those desks, because 36 in 3,960 feet is denser than our planning number, so a team of 23 inherits room and a team that means to fill every seat should sit in the space first. No floor plan has been published, so the plate has to be read on the tour.

What $72 a foot means here

Flatiron runs $43 to $115 per square foot on our book around a median of $72, and this floor asks exactly that median. The citywide median is $75, so it prices three dollars under the city while sitting exactly level with its own submarket. Priced at market for where it sits, with no visible discount for the sublease.

Monthly figures place it better than percentages do. The partial ninth at 900 Broadway asks $92 on 2,940 square feet, about $22,540 a month, so this floor buys 1,020 more square feet for roughly $1,200 more. The ninth at 276 Fifth Avenue asks $52 on 5,500 square feet, about $23,833, which is 1,540 more square feet for effectively the same check. The sixth at 137 East 25th Street asks $43 on 8,308 square feet, about $29,770.

Read against that spread, the honest position is mid-pack per foot with the furniture doing the work. A tenant here spends nothing on buildout and no weeks on permits, worth real money against a raw floor asking $52 that needs design, filing and construction first. A tenant who wants five years of certainty is paying market rent for a term ending in June 2027.

The block and the submarket

Transit reads N/Q/R/W, 4/5/6, F/M, L at 14th and 23rd, which puts a hiring radius across all five boroughs and New Jersey inside a single ride, and explains why companies that land in Flatiron tend to renew rather than chase a cheaper zip code.

This has been the center of New York's venture-backed tech scene since the Silicon Alley years, and the building stock is the reason: prewar lofts off Fifth Avenue and Broadway with full floors big enough for a real office and small enough that one company holds the plate. Software companies, agencies and small professional firms are what we place on floors this size.

Our book holds six Flatiron floors, 2,940 to 10,562 square feet and 17 to 60 desks. 30 West 21st Street, on the same street, carries the submarket high at $115 and the largest block nearby, while 276 Fifth Avenue and 137 East 25th Street sit at the value end on bigger plates. NoMad, Union Square and Chelsea are where we look next.

How to evaluate this floor

Tour with the seating plan you actually intend to run, because a furnished floor flatters the company whose shape matches the layout already there and punishes the one whose shape does not. A walk-through should settle how the open area divides, whether two conference rooms and one meeting room carry your meeting load, and what condition the workstations are in.

Ask for the rentable and the usable measurements in writing. The 3,960 is a rentable figure, as nearly every number quoted in New York is, and usable area comes out smaller by whatever loss factor applies, which on a partial floor is worth pinning down before headcount gets planned around it.

Rent covers occupancy and not operations. Electricity is billed on top at the usual $2-4 per square foot a year, roughly $660 to $1,320 a month at this size, and cleaning scope, the after-hours HVAC rate and how escalations pass through belong in the same review.

The sublease structure adds its own checklist. Read the prime lease, because a sublease sits inside it and can end with it unless the landlord signs a recognition agreement. Move the overlandlord's consent early, confirm who holds the security, put the furniture into the document as conveyed property rather than a courtesy, and settle who restores what in June 2027. What the landlord wants to keep you past that date, not the $72, is what a five-year plan here costs.

How we work on it

We represent tenants and only tenants. No landlord pays us to defend this asking rent, and we publish what every floor on our book asks, this one included.

In practice that means arranging the tour, pulling the measurement and the prime lease out of the sublandlord's agent, opening the direct-extension conversation before you sign rather than after, running a test fit against your headcount, and carrying the deal to signature. With 300+ buildouts behind us, we can price what this floor would cost to change.