An NYC Office Tour for a Startup Team: How Many Floors, and Where

How many offices a startup should tour before deciding

Our tour checklist gives three numbers. A first afternoon covers four to six floors. A whole search usually covers eight to twelve, spread over two or three afternoons. Second visits go to the best two or three. Beyond that the floors blur and the comparison gets worse, not better. When a team asks for a fourth afternoon, the brief is usually the problem: the budget, the size or the move date has not been fixed. How to tour office space sets out the whole process.

Picking the two neighborhoods for a first afternoon

Start with commutes, not taste. List the home subway stations of the people you employ and the people you hope to hire, then count the transfers each would make to reach a district. That exercise usually removes half the map.

Then choose two districts that sit side by side. Neighbors can be walked between, and seeing them back to back makes obvious the differences a team would otherwise argue over for weeks. Flatiron's neighbors are Chelsea, NoMad and Union Square, so any of the three pairs with it. Choosing an office neighborhood explains the method.

How we route the afternoon so the floors can be compared

• One district first, then the other, with the buildings in walking order, so the time goes to floors and not to transit.
• An identical fact sheet at every stop: size, cost per month, condition, earliest move-in.
• The same questions put to every landlord's agent, so the answers line up.
• A ranking made that evening, while the details are still clear.

Nomad coordinates the appointments and the travel between buildings, then sends a side-by-side comparison of what you saw.

Where touring sits in the whole search

Touring is the short part. With a defined brief the search stage usually takes two to four weeks, and a decisive team reaches a letter of intent a couple of weeks after its first tour. The lease and the move come next. Measured from that first tour, a decisive team on a prebuilt floor is typically at its desks in six to eight weeks. Where construction is required first, allow four to six months instead.

One afternoon's list: the Flatiron example

Flatiron runs from Union Square up to Madison Square Park, around Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Its buildings are prewar lofts with regular floor plates, tall ceilings and big windows, most of them leased one full floor to one company, and the N, Q, R, W and 6 trains stop at 23rd Street. The block below lists the Flatiron floors we publish, with their sizes and, where published, their asking rents. Read it as the first half of an afternoon and add a neighboring district for the second. The Flatiron guide describes the neighborhood.