825 Third Avenue: Office Space for Lease

The one floor on our book here

One space is available here through us, the more expensive of the two Grand Central floors we represent.

• Partial 29th Floor, 5,230 square feet, asking $89 per square foot per year. That is $465,470 a year and roughly $38,789 a month before electricity, and it seats about 30 people at the 175 square feet per person we plan to. A denser open plan takes 37; a layout weighted toward private offices lands nearer 23.

Our own photography and a floor plan sit on the listing, so a team can test its headcount against the real layout before touring, and at 30 desks the asking rate works out to about $1,293 a seat per month.

What $89 means against the market

The two Grand Central floors we represent ask $72 and $89, a median of $81, so this one sits about 10% above the submarket midpoint and roughly 19% above the $75 citywide median across our availability. It prices high, for the district and for the city.

Our cleanest comparison sits a few blocks west. 60 East 42nd Street offers 5,772 square feet at $72, about $34,632 a month against $38,789 here, so this floor costs more for 542 fewer square feet and works out to $1,293 a seat against $1,050. Across five years, before escalation, that is close to $250,000 more.

The rest of our book reads differently. The comparables we track for this floor, all between 5,023 and 5,772 square feet, run $50 at 213 West 35th Street in Penn Plaza, $72 at 60 East 42nd Street, and $115 at both 30 West 21st Street in Flatiron and 4 World Trade Center in FiDi. Line those five up and $89 sits exactly in the middle: high for Grand Central, ordinary for a high floor with a view, and a premium worth naming before you pay it.

The submarket around the building

Transit is the first argument the address makes: 4/5/6, 7, S and Metro-North. The last does most of the work, since Metro-North brings Westchester and Connecticut into the terminal your subway riders already use, and teams whose founders or clients come from either direction save twenty minutes each way against most alternatives.

Tenants around the terminal skew professional services, law, finance and consulting, which keeps the district polished by day and quiet after seven, and the stock mixes prewar boutique floors with newer tower plates. A floor asking $89 with long views self-selects toward the firm that brings clients upstairs, not the one that only needs desks.

Nearby, our book is thin. Grand Central holds this floor and 60 East 42nd Street at 5,772 square feet, and nothing else. Midtown gives four floors between 7,092 and 19,097 square feet at $79 to $130, Bryant Park four between 4,109 and 17,296 square feet at $65 to $125, and Murray Hill nothing at the moment, so a 30-desk requirement near the terminal still chooses between two floors rather than shopping a list.

How to evaluate the floor, and what really sets the cost

Tours earn their hour by settling what a listing cannot. This is a partial floor, so establish where the demising line runs and who sits on the other side, ask whether the offering is direct or a sublease, since that changes the term and the buildout money, and get the delivery condition in writing. Go up at the hour you would be working, since the view is the pitch and should be judged from where desks would sit.

Treat 5,230 as rentable area, not the space you can furnish. Manhattan loss factors typically run 15-25%, putting the usable floor near 3,923 to 4,446 square feet once core, corridors and restrooms come out, so ask for a test fit before the letter of intent.

Base rent covers occupancy and, in most Manhattan leases, cleaning of the office areas. Electricity is billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot per year, about $872 to $1,743 a month here, and internet, insurance, overtime HVAC and the tax and operating escalations ride separately.

Blended rent across the term is what you actually sign for. An unnegotiated 3% escalation turns $89 into about $100 by the fifth year and averages near $95 over five, while three months free on a sixty-month term takes roughly 5% off the deal. At the top of a submarket we push hardest on free rent, the escalation cap, the improvement allowance and the form of security, usually a letter of credit behind a good guy guarantee.

How Nomad works on this floor

We represent tenants and never landlords, so nobody on our side is paid by the building, and the size, the asking rent and the approximate monthly are published here rather than held back for a phone call.

A tour can usually be arranged inside the same week, and we will add 60 East 42nd Street to the trip so the seventeen dollar difference gets tested in person. Having run 300+ buildouts across New York, we can price what changing this layout would cost before anything is signed, which usually decides whether the premium buys something you use every day.