540 Broadway: Office Space for Lease

What is available at 540 Broadway today

One space sits on our book here, and it is a whole floor rather than a piece of one.

• Entire 2nd Floor, 6,350 square feet, asking $85 per square foot per year. That is $539,750 a year and roughly $44,979 a month before electricity, and it seats about 36 people at the 175 square feet per person we plan to, which leaves room for meeting rooms and a pantry. A dense open plan takes 45, private offices nearer 28, and at 36 seats the rent is about $1,249 a desk.

The floor is furnished and plug-and-play, with entrances on both Broadway and Crosby Street, two private offices or meeting rooms, a conference room, a wet pantry, a lounge, a phone booth, reception and an open area drawn for up to 40 workstations. We hold the floor plan and our own photography, so a team can test its seating before touring.

What $85 a foot means here

SoHo asks more than the rest of our book. The nine floors we represent here run $68 to $125 per square foot per year, and our submarket record puts SoHo about 31% above the $75 citywide median across our availability. The SoHo median is $98, thirteen dollars above what this floor asks, which leaves it about 13% above the city.

That median hides how it is made. One floor dwarfs the rest, 27,344 square feet at One Soho Square asking $68, and a block that size prices at a per-foot discount everywhere in Manhattan. Set that aside and the floors a 25 to 45 person company would shortlist read $78 at 6 Greene Street, $85 here, $95 at 110 Greene Street, $98 at 50 Greene Street, $110 at 104-110 Greene Street, $120 at 60 Charlton Street and $125 at both 520 Broadway and the 503-511 Broadway penthouse.

This floor prices at the friendly end of that set, second cheapest of the eight, nineteen dollars a foot under their $104 median and larger than all but one of them. Part of that is height, since low floors ask less than high ones in essentially every Manhattan building, so whether the discount reads as a bargain turns on how the light suits your team.

The blocks around the building

Broadway carries the cast-iron district along with Greene and Mercer, and the trains reach it from every direction: N/Q/R/W, 6, A/C/E, B/D/F/M, six lines inside a five-minute walk.

Companies that pick SoHo are usually brand-led, fashion and design and consumer businesses for whom the address does part of the selling, joined lately by AI startups whose founders live downtown. The loft stock is landmarked and nineteenth-century, with twelve-foot-plus ceilings, timber columns and plates that run long and narrow, so a plan drawn for a Midtown box gets drawn again.

Our book holds four more floors within a short walk: 520 Broadway at 5,539 square feet asking $125, 50 Greene Street at 7,300 asking $98, 110 Greene Street at 3,750 asking $95 and 6 Greene Street at 4,900 asking $78. NoHo, Hudson Square and Tribeca sit adjacent, and a team needing much less than 6,350 square feet should look at a smaller floor here or across a border.

How to judge the floor, and what actually sets the cost

An hour on the floor pays for itself only if it settles what a listing cannot. Furnished is a word used loosely, so walk the inventory and get in writing what stays. Establish whether both entrances are yours, what electrical capacity and overtime air cost, and whether this is direct space or a sublease, since that changes the term, the buildout money and the counterparty.

Treat 6,350 as a rentable number rather than a floor you can furnish end to end. Loss factors in Manhattan typically run 15-25%, so usable area lands near 4,800 to 5,400 square feet once corridors, lobby share and restrooms come out. The difference is worth several desks.

Base rent covers occupancy and, in most Manhattan leases, cleaning of the office areas. Electricity is billed separately at roughly $2 to $4 per square foot per year, about $1,050 to $2,100 a month here, with internet, insurance, overtime HVAC and the tax and operating escalations on top.

Blended rent across the term decides the real cost. An unnegotiated 3% escalation turns $85 into about $96 by year five and averages near $90 over five years, while three months free on a sixty-month deal takes roughly 5% off and returns the blended figure to the headline. A furnished floor needs little improvement allowance, so the leverage moves to free rent, the escalation cap, the security amount and form, and the restoration clause.

How we work on this one

We represent tenants and not landlords, so we never sit on both sides of this deal. The rent, the size and the monthly are published here because a number held back is usually a number about to be marked up.

Touring is easy to arrange, generally inside the same week, and we walk the SoHo comparables on the same trip so $85 gets judged against $78 and $95 and $125. Having delivered 300+ office buildouts across New York, we answer construction questions with the same people who negotiate the lease.