NYC Office Listings: How to Read One Before You Tour

NYC office listings give you five or six facts, and each means something narrower than it looks. The asking rent is dollars per rentable square foot per year, so multiply it by the size and divide by twelve to see a monthly figure. The size is rentable, which overstates the room you can furnish by 15 to 25 percent. The remaining fields tell you whether you get the whole floor, whether it is furnished, when you can take possession and for how long. Read them in that order and most office rentals sort themselves into tour or skip.

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Updated 2026-10-03 · Nomad Group

The asking rent field on an office listing

The number beside the dollar sign is an annual rate for each rentable square foot, and it is the landlord's opening position, not a settled price. To see a month, multiply the rate by the listed square feet and divide by twelve. Say a listing shows 5,000 square feet at $60: that is $300,000 a year, or $25,000 a month.

That figure is base rent only. How rent per square foot works walks through the conversion and what the unit hides.

Square feet on a listing, and how many people they hold

The size on a listing is rentable square feet, a measure that includes a share of the building's lobbies, corridors and mechanical rooms. The area you can put desks on, the usable figure, runs 15 to 25 percent below it. Loss factor is the name for that gap.

For headcount, divide the listed size by 175. A 5,250 square foot listing holds about 30 people with meeting rooms and a pantry. A dense open plan holds more, and a layout full of private offices holds fewer.

The remaining fields on a listing: floor, condition, possession, term

Entire or partial floor: entire means you are the only tenant on the level. Partial means a suite off a shared corridor.
Furnished or pre-built: the office is already constructed, and a furnished one has desks in place. No such label usually means the floor needs work or is offered as the last tenant left it.
Possession: the date the landlord can hand over the space. A floor that is occupied until spring cannot solve a January move.
Term: the length of lease on offer. A sublease shows an end date instead, because it expires with the lease above it.

What a listing leaves out

Four things that change the cost never appear on the page.

Electricity, a separate charge of roughly $2 to $4 a square foot each year.
Escalations, which raise the rent by roughly 2.5 to 3 percent a year.
The security deposit or letter of credit the landlord will require.
Concessions: the free rent and improvement money a landlord may offer once you make a proposal.

The first three add to the asking rent and the fourth subtracts from it, which is how a pair of listings at the same rate can end up far apart.

Why published office rentals are not the whole market

Sublease space and floors that are not yet on the market pass through brokers before any website shows them. A published list is a sample of the market, never all of it.

Lists also differ in what they tell you. Many withhold the rent and ask you to inquire. Ours publish the asking rent on nearly every floor, and the size and street address on all of them. The floors below are sized for about 30 people, a spread wide enough to practice reading on.

Floors that fit a team of 30

Live from our listings · 6 of the 22, smallest first

A team of 30 plans on about 5,250 square feet at 175 a person. 22 floors on our book sit in the range that fits, 5,250 to 9,450 square feet, asking $43 to $125 per square foot per year on the 21 with a published rent.

Floors: 22
Sizes: 5,250-9,000 sq ft
Asking rent: $43-$125 / sq ft

Every available floor, filterable by size →

The full guide

This page is the short answer. The long one, with the numbers worked through, is here:

Why do some office listings say rent on request?

Because the landlord or its agent prefers to quote in conversation. The phrase tells you nothing about the price. Ask for the asking rent, the rentable size and the possession date before agreeing to a tour, so the visit is worth the afternoon.

Is the asking rent on a listing what tenants end up paying?

Rarely to the dollar. It is where negotiation starts, and landlords tend to give free rent and improvement money before they lower the face rate. What counts is the cost across the whole term once those are included. How to negotiate an office lease shows what moves.

How do I compare a furnished listing with an unfurnished one?

Add what the unfurnished floor still needs. Furniture and cabling are yours to buy, and so is any construction beyond the landlord's allowance. A furnished floor often asks more per square foot and can still cost less in the first year, because none of that applies.

Does a bigger listed size always mean more desks?

No. Two floors with the same rentable figure can hold different headcounts, because the loss factor differs by building, and columns, elevators and window lines shape the layout. A test fit, a quick plan of your team on the actual floor, settles it. What a test fit is explains.

Talk to a broker

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Tell us three things: team size, timing, budget. A first shortlist can be ready within 24 hours, with the asking rent on every floor that publishes one.

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