Financial District Office Space for Rent: What Is Available and What It Costs

What is on the market in FiDi, and how to read the numbers

The live block further down is the current answer: how many FiDi floors we hold, the smallest and largest, the range of asking rents and the median. Each rent is quoted per rentable square foot for a year, so the monthly figure is the rate times the square footage, divided by twelve.

Read the individual floors before the median. Downtown has tower floors with harbor views at the top of its range and plain partial floors at the bottom, and one premium listing can pull a small sample's middle upward. The value in this district is usually found in the floors below that middle.

The buildings: old bank towers rebuilt, and glass from after 2001

FiDi's office stock comes in two generations. The prewar bank towers have marble lobbies and setback crowns, and their floors have been rebuilt to modern standards over the past two decades. The towers around the World Trade Center offer column-free plates and glass from floor to ceiling.

What both share is the prebuilt floor: glass-fronted rooms, a plumbed pantry and sometimes furniture already in place. On a tour, settle the view question first. A high floor facing the water and an interior low floor in the same tower are different products, and the gap in rent between them is often small. The FiDi neighborhood guide walks the district in detail.

Subway, PATH and ferry: who can get to a FiDi office

• Two express pairs, the 4/5 and the 2/3, each stopping at Wall Street and at Fulton Street.
• Local service from the R/W, the 1 and the J/Z, with the A/C at Fulton and the E ending at the World Trade Center.
• PATH into the Oculus for staff coming from New Jersey, and the Staten Island Ferry at Whitehall.

Brooklyn is one or two stops away, which is why teams living there treat FiDi as their closest Manhattan address. The weak spot is Metro-North: riders arrive at Grand Central and still need the 4/5 downtown, so a team full of them usually stays near the terminal.

Startup or scaling company: which one FiDi suits

Both, for different reasons. A startup gets a finished floor without funding a buildout, in a district where a first private office is commonly a partial tower floor. A scaling company gets depth: there is enough supply downtown that a tenant outgrowing its floor can usually trade up without leaving the neighborhood.

The trade is atmosphere. The streets are corporate by day and quieter at night, though roughly 60,000 residents now live below Chambers Street and the restaurants that serve them stay open. A team that ranks commute coverage and cost per desk above a fashionable address tends to choose it.

After you pick a FiDi floor: the lease, then the buildout

Once a floor is chosen, we ask the landlord for a written proposal and set it beside at least one alternative. Downtown owners tend to hold the asking rent and give in the package, so the comparison is on what the term costs after free rent. We then negotiate the letter of intent and work through the lease with your attorney.

If the floor needs changes, Nomad's construction management team prices and runs the work, and facilities management can look after the office once you are in.