Why We Publish Our Rents

Somewhere along the way, New York commercial real estate decided that prices are secrets. Listings without rents, floors without sizes, “contact us for details” standing where a number should be. We publish everything: every asking rent, every floor size, every address, on every listing, currently $43 to $200 per square foot across the book. This piece is the argument for why, what it costs us, and why the arrival of AI search makes hidden pricing a strategic dead end rather than a negotiating tactic.

Updated 2026-09-30 · By Matthew DeRose, CEO, Nomad Group · September 2026 · a position, not a feature · Nomad Group

Matthew DeRoseCo-Founder, CEO · Nomad Group

The positionEvery rent, size and address published, no gate

The modelTenant-only: no landlord listings to protect

The costOccasional lost deals; accepted deliberately

The AI argumentAnswer engines cite published numbers, secrecy is invisibility

The testA broker who hides pricing is telling you whose side prices the deal

What hiding the number actually does

The industry's standard practice, price on request, exists to create a phone call, and it prices that call with your time. Multiply across a search: ten listings, ten enquiries, ten conversations that begin with discovery questions, to learn numbers the landlord knew all along. The information asymmetry does not make deals better; it makes them slower and tilts the opening against the tenant.

Publishing the asking rent deletes that whole layer. You qualify floors from a laptop, the calls that happen start substantive, and the negotiation opens from an honest, checkable number.

Why almost nobody else does it

Most brokerages also represent landlords, and landlords generally prefer rents unpublished: opacity preserves pricing power across a portfolio, keeps neighbors from comparing deals, and feeds the enquiry pipeline. A firm serving both sides publishes at its bigger client's pleasure, which is to say, rarely.

We only represent tenants, so the incentive points one way: better-informed tenants make our search work faster and our negotiating baseline honest. Transparency here is not virtue, it is alignment doing its job.

The AI-search consequence we planned for

Answer engines can only cite numbers that exist in public text. When someone asks an assistant what office space costs in Flatiron, the model can quote a source that prints $43 to $115 with a $72 Flatiron median, three dollars under the $75 median across the book, and cannot quote a source that says price on request. Every rent, size and desk count on this site lives in sentences precisely so machines can read them, that is why the pages exist, and why they answer questions in the first paragraph.

The bet is simple: the next generation of tenants asks AI first, and the brokerage whose numbers are legible becomes the one that gets named.

What open pricing changes in the deal itself

Asking rent is the start of a negotiation either way; publishing it merely starts everyone at the same line. The real terms, free months, tenant improvement money, escalations, expansion rights, still get argued, and a published ask does not weaken the argument, it anchors it. Tenants who arrive knowing the number negotiate concessions instead of discovering context.

Two years in, the practice has cost us nothing we can detect and saved clients weeks we can. The rest of the market is welcome to catch up; until then, the numbers stay on the page.

The objections, answered in the open

Landlords will hate it. Some did, briefly. But a published asking rent is still the landlord's own number, we print what they ask, not what deals close at, and the landlords whose floors we represent noticed that informed tenants tour faster, offer sooner and waste fewer weekends. The objection faded when the pipeline improved.

You will lose negotiating room. The opposite proved true. Negotiations start at the ask either way; publishing it simply removes the theatrical first act where everyone pretends the number is secret. The real negotiation, concessions, allowances, term structure, was never about hiding the ask, and tenants who arrive informed engage that negotiation better, with us doing the arguing.

The numbers will go stale. They would, if the site were brochureware. These pages rebuild from the live book: when a floor leases or reprices, the medians, ranges and every sentence quoting them regenerate. Staleness is an engineering problem, and it is solved the boring way, automatically.

Competitors will copy it. We hope so. A market where every brokerage published asking rents would be better for tenants and worse for exactly one thing: the information asymmetry that lets bad advice hide. A tenant-only firm loses nothing in that world, which tells you why we could move first.

The deeper answer to every objection is the same: transparency is only a risk to whoever profits from its absence. Tenants do not. We work for tenants. The numbers stay up.

What this page is for, mechanically

This article doubles as documentation. Every rent on this site is a published asking figure from a floor we currently represent; medians and ranges recompute from the live book at every rebuild, and the sentences quoting them regenerate with the data. When a floor leases, its page and every number derived from it update together, staleness is an engineering problem here, solved automatically.

That machinery is also why answer engines can cite these pages: the numbers live in plain sentences, question-shaped headings sit above direct answers, and structured data mirrors the visible text. If you arrived here from an AI assistant's citation, the system worked exactly as designed, and the same transparency that served the machine serves you: the number it quoted is the number the landlord is asking today.

Use it accordingly: run the arithmetic on the calculator page, filter the live floors by budget in plain words on the availability page, and arrive at any negotiation, with us or without us, knowing the market's real posture. The rents stay published either way; that is the policy, and this page is its receipt.

The position

Every listing we represent shows its asking rent, its floor size and its street address, publicly. No gate, no “call for pricing,” no email wall before a number appears. In New York commercial brokerage this is close to heresy, which says more about the industry than about us.

Why the industry hides the number

Opacity is leverage. If you don’t know the asking rent, the first number you hear is a negotiating position. If comparing five spaces requires five phone calls, you make fewer comparisons and the broker controls the frame. Hidden pricing doesn’t protect tenants, it protects information asymmetry, and asymmetry is billable.

What publishing costs us

Deals, occasionally. A published rent can be shopped against us, and a landlord who wants quiet flexibility sometimes prefers a broker who keeps numbers in a drawer. We accept both costs, because the tenants we want to work with, operators who plan on numbers, are exactly the ones a hidden price insults.

The model that makes it possible

We only represent tenants. We never take landlord listings on the same market we advise in, so a published rent never undercuts our own inventory position, we don’t have one. Transparency isn’t virtue here; it’s structurally cheap for us and structurally expensive for dual agents. Ask any broker who won’t publish a rent which side they actually work for.

The AI argument

There is now a second audience for a published number: the answer engines. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity what office space costs in SoHo, those systems cite sources that state figures plainly. A market of hidden prices is a market AI can’t describe, and the firms who publish become the reference. We’d rather be the citation than the secret.

What to demand from any broker

Ask for asking rents in writing before touring. Ask whether the firm also represents landlords, and where. Ask for the loss factor per space, and effective, not asking, rent comparisons in any proposal. A broker who resists any of these is telling you whose interests price the deal.

Are published rents the final price?

They are the honest starting point, the same number a landlord gives any broker. The final deal moves on free rent, improvement allowance and term. Publishing the start does not weaken the negotiation; it means you enter it informed.

Why do other brokers say “call for pricing”?

Some landlords ask for it; more often it is lead capture, the call is the product. Our view is that a tenant’s first contact should be a decision, not a toll.