66 Hudson Boulevard: Office Space for Lease

What is available in the building today

One floor sits on our book here, and an honest page about it starts with what we do not have.

• Partial 53rd Floor: 10,517 rentable square feet, $200 per square foot per year, about $175,283 a month and $2,103,400 a year, rated at 60 desks on the 175 square feet per person standard we plan to.

There is no description on record for this floor, no photography and no floor plan on our file, and we are not going to invent one. Delivery condition, the shape of the plate and what the rent includes are things we get from ownership and put in front of you before a tour. Describing a floor nobody has described to us would only be describing a different floor.

The arithmetic we can do from the desk. At 175 square feet a head the floor plans to about 60 people, a denser open plan closer to 75, a layout weighted toward private offices nearer 47. A test fit against your real org chart will move those before a lease does.

Reading the $200

Across the 49 floors we represent in eleven submarkets, asking rents run $43 to $200. This floor is the $200, and nothing else we hold comes near it.

The next most expensive floor on our book is a partial 17th at 2 Penn Plaza, $135, and after that the numbers fall away quickly. Against the $75 median across everything we represent in New York, $200 sits about 167% higher. On this footprint that is $125 a foot, $1,314,625 a year, the difference between $175,283 a month and roughly $65,731. Across five years, before a single escalation, about $6.6 million.

So the question is not whether $200 is a lot. It is whether the address does work that $6.6 million would otherwise have to do elsewhere in the business. For a company whose clients and candidates come through the door, and for whom the newest building in New York is a requirement rather than a preference, it sometimes does, and a business that can carry $2.1 million a year without relitigating it every quarter should look seriously.

For everyone else the answer is no, and we will say so on the phone before you spend an afternoon on it. A floor taken at the top of the market by a company that has to justify it internally becomes a sublease listing two years later.

The submarket around the building

Transit here is the 7 at 34th Street Hudson Yards, with A/C/E and LIRR at Penn, and that is the whole of what we will claim about the commute. Hudson Yards is a recently built district raised over the West Side rail yards, and the 7 was run west to serve it.

This is our first and only floor in the submarket, and we would rather flag that than let it pass. One listing is not a market. A median built from a single number tells you what one landlord asks on one plate, and it will move the day we take on a second floor here.

So the comparison lives next door. Penn Plaza sits a few blocks east on the same commuter rail with a $52 median across three floors, Chelsea runs $56 across nine, Midtown $125 across four. Any of them shows what the same monthly check buys in a different building.

How to judge this floor on a tour

The 10,517 is rentable, and rentable in New York folds in a share of the lobby, the corridors and the mechanical rooms that no tenant lays a desk in. At the 15-25% loss factors common here the usable footprint lands between about 7,888 and 8,939 square feet, which turns $200 rentable into roughly $235 to $267 per usable foot, and 60 desks into 131 to 149 usable feet a head. The $75 citywide median is a rentable number too, so compare like with like.

The ask is also not the occupancy cost. Electricity is commonly billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot, another $21,034 to $42,068 a year here, cleaning and after-hours HVAC sit outside the rent, and escalations run off a base year whose definition deserves an argument in the lease.

Because we have no description on file, the tour carries more weight here than it would elsewhere. Walk it with a list: delivery condition and what ownership will build, the shape of the plate and where the core and columns land, what the building's services include and what is billed separately, direct deal or sublease, the term, and the free rent and improvement allowance, which move effective cost further than another dollar off the face rate ever will. Then test fit before anybody falls for the address.

How Nomad works on this building

We work one side of the table. We do not represent this building's ownership, which is why the $200 is printed here in plain sight instead of behind a form, and why we will write down that most tenants who inquire about it should probably be touring something else.

We will arrange the tour, usually within the week, and we will not show it to you alone. Set beside a Penn Plaza floor and a Chelsea floor at similar size, $200 either justifies itself in the first ten minutes or it does not. Send us your headcount, your hiring plan and the date you need people sitting down.

We have run 300+ office buildouts across 2M+ square feet in New York, so what ownership is offering to build, and what finishing a floor this size costs, comes out of our own job records rather than a market average.