Office Space $50 to $75 per Sq Ft in Flatiron

What this band buys in Flatiron right now

Flatiron carries six available floors on our book and five publish an asking rent, so two inside this band is the middle of the neighborhood, not a corner of it.

• 276 Fifth Avenue, 9th floor: 5,500 square feet at $52 per square foot per year, about $23,833 a month, roughly 31 desks. Our record puts it in a prewar Fifth Avenue building at 30th Street near Madison Square Park, with no furniture or fitted rooms listed, so condition is a tour question.
• 54 West 21st Street, partial 4th floor: 3,960 square feet at $72, about $23,760 a month, roughly 23 desks, furnished and carrying a pantry, a conference room and phone booths. It is the shortest path to occupancy in the band.

Twenty dollars separates the asks and seventy-three dollars separates the monthly checks: the cheaper foot buys 1,540 more square feet and eight more desks, the dearer one buys a floor that is finished. One is a partial floor, so confirm which of the two is a whole plate.

The monthly math, worked plainly

New York quotes office rent annually per rentable square foot, so the number a finance team needs is one multiplication and one division. At 276 Fifth Avenue, 5,500 square feet times $52 gives $286,000 a year, divided by twelve gives $23,833 a month. At 54 West 21st Street, 3,960 times $72 gives $285,120 and $23,760.

Carry one shortcut onto a tour: a dollar of asking rent costs the square footage divided by twelve every month, so a dollar is $458 on 5,500 feet and $330 on 3,960. Per desk the two stop looking alike, about $769 a month on the larger floor and $1,033 on the smaller.

The footage in any quote is rentable, not usable, so ask for a measured plan and compare cost per seat.

What the asking rent does not include

Budgets in this band break below the headline. Five costs sit outside the asking rent, and each can be priced before signing.

• Electric is rarely in base rent here: either a submeter plus an administration factor, or a fixed inclusion of roughly $2 to $4 per square foot per year, $11,000 to $22,000 annually on 5,500 feet.
• Cleaning may or may not be included. Ask what nightly service covers, since pantries, interior glass and rubbish removal are carved out routinely.
• Real estate tax escalations run from a base year fixed in the lease, after which you pay a share of every increase above it, so a base struck against a partly assessed building costs real dollars by year three.
• Operating expense escalations arrive as a pass-through over a base year or as a porter's wage formula, and they stack on the annual step in base rent itself, about 2.5-3% a year.
• Buildout above the allowance is the largest of the five, since anything past it is your cash or gets amortized back into rent at interest. That is part of what the furnished floor's extra twenty dollars buys.

What is actually negotiable at these numbers

Face rent moves least here, because ownership is protecting the number it will quote on the next floor in the stack. Asking rent and taking rent differ, and five items build the gap.

• Free rent is the first concession most landlords give, since it costs a period of income rather than a permanently lower number. Place it across construction and the opening months.
• The improvement allowance is worth more than a dollar off the rent on a floor that needs work and close to nothing on one already furnished. On the unfitted floor we push for progress payments and a work letter.
• Term length is the currency concessions are bought with, since five years will not carry what ten carries. Trade the extra years for an expansion or renewal option.
• Escalation caps decide what year five costs. Fix the base rent step at a stated percentage rather than an index, cap the operating expense pass-through, and negotiate a fully assessed tax base year.
• The good guy guarantee is negotiable in every part: who signs it, the notice you owe before vacating, whether it burns off after a period of clean payment, and how fast it ends after surrender.

Where this band sits, and who it suits

The median asking rent across our New York book is $75 per square foot per year. One floor here sits twenty-three dollars under it and the other three dollars under, so this band stops just short of the city median rather than beating it.

Flatiron's own median is $72 across the six floors we carry, about 4% below the city, on a range of $43 to $115, so the top of this band and the neighborhood median are the same number. Only 137 East 25th Street at $43 asks below the band; 900 Broadway at $92 and the 30 West 21st Street penthouse at $115 sit above it.

The band fits a team of roughly 23 to 31 people that wants the Flatiron address and the trunk lines at 14th and 23rd Street. Below about 20 desks it offers nothing, since the neighborhood's smallest floor is 2,940 square feet at $92, and above 31 desks our Chelsea book holds six floors in this same band.