Office Space $75 to $100 per Sq Ft in NYC

What the band buys across the city right now

Eleven floors, 67,572 square feet, 386 desks, $492,974 a month, at 175 square feet per person. Nine arrive furnished or prebuilt; only 900 Broadway and 825 Third Avenue need building.

• 1700 Broadway, entire 26th, Midtown: 13,266 feet at $79, $87,335 a month, 76 desks, furnished.
• 5 Bryant Park, entire 33rd: 7,500 feet at $96, $60,000 a month, 43 desks, through March 2028.
• 17 State Street, partial 26th, FiDi: 6,606 feet at $79, $43,490 a month, 38 desks, prebuilt.
• 540 Broadway, entire 2nd, SoHo: 6,350 feet at $85, $44,979 a month, 36 desks, plug and play.
• 825 Third Avenue, partial 29th, Grand Central: 5,230 feet at $89, $38,789 a month, 30 desks.
• 6 Greene Street, entire 2nd, SoHo: 4,900 feet at $78, $31,850 a month, 28 desks.
• 110 Greene Street, partial 5th, SoHo: 3,750 feet at $95, $29,688 a month, 21 desks.
• 900 Broadway, partial 9th, Flatiron: 2,940 feet at $92, $22,540 a month, 17 desks.

The monthly math, worked plainly

Rent is quoted annually per rentable foot, so the monthly number is one multiplication and one division: 2,940 times $92 is $270,480, over twelve is $22,540 at 900 Broadway. Faster, divide the rent by twelve and read it per foot per month, so $96 is $8 and 7,500 feet is $60,000.

At 175 feet a person, every dollar of asking rent is about $14.58 per desk per month, which brackets the whole band between $1,094 and $1,458 a seat. Ours run $1,138 to $1,419.

Footages are rentable, not usable, and five of the ten are partial floors paying for corridor and restrooms they do not occupy, so we compare cost per usable seat off a measured plan.

What the asking rent does not include

Budgets in this band break underneath the asking rent, on four costs outside the quoted number.

• Electric is seldom inside base rent, arriving as a submeter or a fixed $2 to $4 a foot a year: $5,880 to $11,760 at 900 Broadway, $26,532 to $53,064 at 1700 Broadway.
• Cleaning reads line by line, since nightly service covers desks and trash while pantry cleanup, interior glass and construction debris are carved out.
• Escalations arrive in layers: an annual step in base rent, commonly 2.5-3%, plus tax and operating expense pass-throughs over a base year that matters more than the rate. At 3%, an $85 rent leaves year five at $95.67, adding roughly $167,000 at 540 Broadway over five years.
• Buildout above any allowance is the largest of the four and the likeliest to go missing from a model, since everything past it is cash or amortized back into rent.

What moves at these rents, and what we push on

Face rent is defended hardest, since the signed number gets quoted on the next floor back.

• Free rent goes first, costing income for a stretch rather than a permanently lower rent roll. Six months on a five-year term at 5 Bryant Park turns $96 asking into $86.40 effective, $54,000 a month.
• The improvement allowance is the weaker lever on a furnished or prebuilt floor, where the landlord's money is already in the ground; we argue it there as a furniture credit.
• Term is the currency the rest gets bought with, and a floor with a fixed end date, as 5 Bryant Park has at March 2028, must amortize its concessions inside that window.
• Security moves in five places: the letter of credit amount, whether it burns down after clean payment, who signs the good guy guarantee, the notice owed before vacating, and whether you must strip out a fit-out you did not build.

How the band sits against the city and each submarket

The median across our New York book is $75 a foot. Inside this band it is $90, about a fifth above the city, and every floor here clears $75 by between $3 and $23.

Against each submarket's own median the same dollars buy different positions. $79 at 1700 Broadway is exactly Midtown's $79. $78 at 6 Greene Street sits well under SoHo's $98, where four of our nine floors fall in this band, so here it sits near the bottom of the market rather than in its middle. $92 at 900 Broadway is $20 clear of Flatiron's $72, $89 at 825 Third Avenue tops our two floors near Grand Central, $79 at 17 State Street clears FiDi's $71.50, and $96 at 5 Bryant Park is the whole of Bryant Park in our book.

Four submarkets hold nothing in the band: Chelsea tops out at $64, Penn Plaza jumps from $52 to $135, Union Square from $60 to $115, and Hudson Yards asks $200. Skipping them has a price: $44,979 a month buys about 31 desks at SoHo's median and about 55 at Chelsea's $56.