Office Space $50 to $75 per Sq Ft in Union Square

What this band buys in Union Square right now

This submarket prices high and rarely has much on the market at once, so the one floor inside the band is the whole of what a $50 to $75 budget reaches here today.

• 29 West 17th Street, partial 7th floor: 2,500 square feet at $60 per square foot per year, about $12,500 a month, roughly 14 desks. Listed furnished, wired and plug and play, with hardwood floors and exposed ceilings, plus a floor plan and tour on the listing page.

The other two floors we carry here sit outside the band: 900 Broadway, Suite 202, asks $115 on 4,000 square feet, nearly double the foot for sixty percent more room, and the 13,754 square foot second floor at 836 Broadway publishes no ask.

Nothing here asks under $50, and the $60 floor is a partial plate, so where the demising line falls is a tour question.

The monthly math, worked plainly

New York quotes office rent annually per rentable square foot, so the figure a finance team needs is one multiplication and one division. Take 2,500 square feet, multiply by the $60 ask to get $150,000 a year, then divide by twelve to get $12,500 a month. Any floor you see yields to those two steps.

Two derived numbers are worth carrying onto a tour. Each dollar of asking rent costs the square footage divided by twelve each month, about $208 here, so talking $60 down to $57 is worth roughly $625 a month. And $12,500 across fourteen desks is about $893 per person, the number to hold against a coworking quote.

That 2,500 is rentable area, carrying a share of the building's common space, so usable area is smaller and the loss factor varies by building. Ask for a measured plan.

What the asking rent does not include

Budgets in this band break below the headline. Five costs sit outside the $60, and each can be priced before signing.

• Electric is rarely inside base rent. Expect a submeter plus an administration factor, or a fixed $2 to $4 per square foot per year, which here is $417 to $833 a month.
• Cleaning may or may not be in the rent, and pantries, interior glass and rubbish removal get carved out routinely, so ask what nightly service covers.
• Real estate tax escalations run from a base year fixed in the lease, after which you pay a share of every increase above it, which a partly assessed building turns into real money by year three.
• Operating expense escalations come as a pass-through over a base year or a porter's wage formula, and they stack on the annual step in base rent itself, commonly 2.5-3% a year.
• Buildout above any allowance is the largest of the five. A furnished, wired floor removes most of it, leaving cabling, access control, signage and whatever the restoration clause makes you undo.

What is actually negotiable at these numbers

Face rent moves least here, because ownership protects the number it intends to quote on the next floor in the stack. Five other items build the gap between asking rent and taking rent.

• Free rent is the first concession most landlords give, since forgone income is easier to grant than a permanently lower number. On a fast-occupancy floor, put those months at the start of the term.
• The improvement allowance is worth far less on a furnished floor than a raw one, so convert that argument into cabling money, a rent credit, or a documented furniture inventory.
• Term length is the currency concessions get bought with, since five years will not carry what ten carries. In a market this tight, spend those years on 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 stretch of clean payment, and how fast it releases.

Where this band sits, and who it suits

The median asking rent across our New York book is $75 per square foot per year. This floor asks $60, and on 2,500 square feet those fifteen dollars come to $37,500 a year, a full three months' rent.

Union Square itself sits nowhere near that number. Across the two local floors that publish an ask the median is $87.50, roughly a sixth above our book, on a range of $60 to $115. The band marks the bottom of this neighborhood, not its middle, and the floor inside it is the cheapest foot here by $55.

It suits a team of about fourteen that wants the 14th Street trunk lines (4/5/6, N/Q/R/W and L) and can work in a partial floor. Past twenty desks it runs out here, and the same $60 buys 2,624 square feet at 45 Broadway in FiDi or 2,937 at 153 West 27th Street in Chelsea.