Commercial Space for Lease in NYC: Five Kinds of Office and How Each Arrives

Five conditions of office space, side by side

• Furnished floor: built, wired and fitted with desks and chairs. You bring laptops. Fastest to occupy, with the least of your own design.
• Pre-built suite: the landlord has already constructed a finished office, typically a pantry, conference rooms and an open area. It may or may not include furniture.
• As-is space: the previous tenant's layout, left in place. It works when their plan is close to yours, and it costs you only what you alter.
• Raw space: an open floor with no usable installation, taken with a custom buildout to your own plan.
• Sublease: another tenant's office for the rest of its lease, usually furnished or as-is, with an end date you do not choose.

Pre-built space explains how that kind is priced into the rent.

Weeks from signing to desks, by condition

• Furnished or pre-built: usually two to four weeks, spent on lease paperwork, insurance and the internet connection, not on construction.
• As-is or sublease: close to that if you change little, and longer with each wall you move.
• Raw with a custom buildout: typically 10 to 16 weeks for design, permits and construction.

Starting design while the lease is still being negotiated shortens the last of these. The buildout cost and timeline guide breaks the weeks down.

Who pays to get each kind ready

On a direct lease for raw or as-is space, the landlord usually contributes a tenant improvement allowance, a sum per square foot put toward construction. It covers hard construction such as walls, ceilings and electrical work. Furniture and cabling usually sit outside it, so they come out of your budget whatever the allowance is.

With a pre-built or furnished floor, the landlord has already spent the money and recovers it through the rent, so there is little left to negotiate on that front. A sublease is taken as it stands, without the buildout money a direct deal can bring. How the improvement allowance works covers what counts as a reimbursable cost.

Entire floor or partial floor on a Chelsea listing

Most of our listings label a space as an entire floor or a partial floor. Entire means your company is the only tenant on that level: the elevator opens into your own reception and nobody shares the corridor. Partial means a portion of a level, with a shared corridor and restrooms, and it is how smaller teams get into buildings whose full floors are too big for them.

The Chelsea floors below show both labels. Chelsea's stock is mostly garment-era loft buildings, six to twelve stories tall, with high ceilings and oversized windows, and many of them put a single company on each level.

Which kind suits which team and timeline

• Desks needed in weeks, not months: furnished or pre-built, whatever the team size.
• A small team, or a satellite office testing New York, that a standard plan of open desks, a few meeting rooms and a pantry will cover: a pre-built suite, often a partial floor.
• A team still hiring and unsure of next year's headcount: furnished, pre-built or a sublease, on a shorter term.
• A larger, settled team that will stay several years and wants its own plan: raw or as-is space with a buildout, usually an entire floor, started four to six months ahead.
• A budget that cannot carry construction: as-is space where the last tenant's layout already fits.