Office Space Broker for Startups: The Four Places a Floor Comes From

What each of the four sources offers a startup

• A direct listing is a lease in your own name with the building's owner. It brings a term you choose, an improvement allowance, free rent and the chance to ask for renewal and expansion options. It is the slowest route when the floor has to be built.
• A sublease is the remainder of another tenant's lease. It usually comes built and often furnished, it is typically priced under direct space, and it ends when that tenant's lease does.
• A lease takeover is an assignment: the lease itself moves to your company, with its term, its obligations and a direct relationship with the landlord. The lease takeover entry explains what you inherit.
• A floor not yet marketed is space that a landlord or a departing tenant has not advertised. No listing exists, so it comes through a broker or not at all.

Why listing sites are the first pass and not the search

Published listings tell you what a neighborhood costs and what its buildings look like, and that is worth knowing before any call. We print the asking rent on nearly every floor we represent, and the rent table sets them side by side.

A listing page cannot show what was never listed. The better subleases often pass between brokers before anyone advertises them, so a search that stops at the websites is choosing from the slower part of the market.

How an office space broker hears about a floor early

Most of it is routine contact. A building's leasing agent mentions that a tenant upstairs is leaving. A company that is shrinking asks a broker what its space would fetch before it decides to sublet.

Nomad also offers agency leasing and owner representation, so some of what it hears comes from the owner's side of the market. When a floor on your shortlist sits in a building we lease on the owner's behalf, we say so. One firm acting for the tenant and the owner is dual agency, and New York requires informed consent from each of them.

Subleases: who pays the broker, and three checks to make

On a direct lease, in most transactions the landlord pays the broker fee. A sublease works differently: the company giving up the space is the one marketing it, so it usually pays the commission. Ask how the fee is handled on any sublease before you tour it.

• The term left. You get what remains, and the sublandlord's renewal rights rarely pass to you.
• The lease above yours. Its rules bind you, including what must be restored when it ends, so read the document and not a summary of it.
• The landlord's consent. It is required, and it moves at the landlord's pace.

The sublease playbook goes through the rest. Your attorney should confirm what the sublease and the lease above it oblige you to do.

Comparing a sublease, a takeover and a direct floor fairly

Offers from different sources arrive in different shapes, so we convert them before you choose. Each becomes a monthly cost over the period you would occupy the space, with free rent, furniture, the improvement allowance and any buildout you would fund counted in.

Then the dates. A floor that is already built and furnished can be occupied two to four weeks after signing, while a custom buildout typically takes 10 to 16 weeks. Below is the ready end of the market: our furnished and pre-built floors, with their sizes and asking rents. Every floor we list is in Manhattan.