900 Broadway: Office Space for Lease

The two floors on our book here

Two spaces sit on our book here, Suite 202 and a partial ninth floor, and they are not one product at two prices.

• Suite 202: 4,000 square feet at $115 per square foot per year, $460,000 annually and about $38,333 a month before electric. Roughly 23 desks at the 175 square feet per person we plan against, 29 on a dense open plan, 18 with offices. A pantry, a conference room and hardwood floors.
• Partial 9th Floor: 2,940 square feet at $92, $270,480 annually and about $22,540 a month. Roughly 17 desks, 21 on benching, about 13 with offices. Hardwood floors, exposed ceiling, natural light along Broadway, loft-style, and the only floor here we hold a plan for.

Per desk the gap narrows, about $1,667 a month on Suite 202 against $1,326 on the ninth, since the cheaper floor is the tighter one. Both have a Matterport walkthrough.

Reading $115 and $92

Our records count these floors in different submarkets, a line drawn in our own files rather than on the street. Suite 202 goes in with the three Union Square floors we represent, $60 to $115 around a median of $87.50, a submarket about 17% above our citywide median. The ninth floor goes in with six Flatiron floors, $43 to $115, median $72.

Against the $75 citywide median, Suite 202 asks $40 more per foot and the ninth floor $17 more; against their own submarkets the gaps are $27.50 and $20, which on these footprints runs to $110,000 and $58,800 a year. The partial fourth at 54 West 21st Street asks $72 on 3,960 square feet, about $23,760 a month.

Both floors price high for their areas, and we would rather say so than dress it up. Some of the premium is the address, since a Broadway line on the letterhead does work for a company whose clients come to it, and some of it is scarcity, three floors in Union Square and six in Flatiron. The rest gets established on the tour.

The submarket around the building

Transit for Union Square reads 4/5/6, N/Q/R/W, L all at 14th Street, and our Flatiron record reads N/Q/R/W, 4/5/6, F/M, L at 14th and 23rd. That convergence is the widest catchment below 42nd Street on our read, a hiring radius more than a commute, and the teams that land here are mostly smaller companies wanting their own front door, the venture-backed cluster that has held Flatiron since the Silicon Alley years among them.

Inventory is the constraint. Union Square holds three floors on our book and this building has one, the others 2,500 square feet at $60 at 29 West 17th Street and 13,754 square feet at 836 Broadway with rent on request. Flatiron widens the field to six floors between 2,940 and 10,562 square feet, among them 8,308 at $43 at 137 East 25th Street, nearly three times the ninth floor's footage for about $7,200 more a month.

How to evaluate either floor

Rentable area in New York folds in a share of common space, so 4,000 and 2,940 are not the numbers anyone walks. At the 15-25% loss factors ordinary in New York, Suite 202 gives back 600 to 1,000 feet and the ninth floor 441 to 735, enough on a 23-desk plan to decide whether the layout keeps two meeting rooms or one.

• What a tour settles: light at the hour the team actually works, street noise with the windows shut, the condition of the floors and the exposed ceilings on nine, whether the pantry and conference room on Suite 202 stay, elevator wait at 9am, and how corridor and restrooms serve a partial floor.
• What the rent excludes: electric typically adds $2 to $4 per square foot per year, cleaning and after-hours HVAC carry their own treatment, and tax and operating escalations sit on top of base rent.
• What decides the real cost: free rent, the improvement allowance, the escalation and its cap, security and any letter of credit, the good guy guarantee, renewal and expansion rights, and the restoration obligation.

Condition sets the calendar too: a floor taken as it stands is occupied two to four weeks after signing, a custom fit-out 10-16 weeks through design, DOB filing and construction.

How Nomad works on this building

We act for tenants and nobody else. No owner here pays us, which is why $115 and $92 sit on this page in plain view rather than behind a form.

A tour can usually be arranged inside the same week, with the walkthroughs and the ninth floor's plan sent first. We then price these floors against everything else within a short walk, run the letter of intent and the lease, and argue escalations, security and the restoration clause. Where a fit-out is part of the plan, design starts while the lease is still being negotiated.