Office Space for 10 People in NYC

Where 175 square feet a person actually goes

The allowance is a room schedule, not a desk measurement. Ten workstations at roughly 60 feet apiece, with chair clearance and aisle, come to 600 feet. A conference room the whole company sits in takes close to 290, a huddle room 120, two phone booths 50, a pantry 200, a landing zone for coats and the network rack 100. Circulation absorbs the last 390.

The figure moves for structural, not stylistic, reasons. Put doors on four of the ten seats and it drifts toward 200 or 225, because a wall consumes circulation on both faces. It comes down when a team shares desks in earnest, but never to the hundred-odd feet a coworking desk implies, because that number is only honest when somebody else owns the conference rooms.

Ten people, priced monthly and across the term

1,750 square feet at $60 is $105,000 a year, $8,750 a month. At the $75 citywide median across our book the same footprint runs $131,250, or $10,938 a month, so these five floors sit about $2,188 a month under the middle of the market. The spread underneath is wide: 1,750 feet costs $77,000 a year at $44, the cheapest of the five, and $161,000 at $92, the dearest.

Geography is the largest lever a company this size holds. Penn Plaza's $52 median prices 1,750 feet at $7,583 a month, Chelsea's $56 at $8,167, Flatiron's $72 at $10,500, Union Square's $87.50 at $12,760, Bryant Park's $96 at $14,000. Add electric at $2 to $4 a foot, $292 to $583 a month, and a customary 3 percent escalation, which carries $60 to $67.53 by year five and the payment to $9,848. Model the last year, not the first.

Rentable feet, usable feet, and one contiguous floor

New York leases on rentable feet, which fold in your share of lobbies, corridors and mechanicals, while usable runs 15 to 25 percent below. On 1,750 rentable, usable lands between 1,313 and 1,488, so the honest allowance is 131 to 149 a person rather than 175. Get the loss factor in writing and pay for a test fit early, because at this size one core wall in the wrong place costs you a meeting room.

Take one contiguous floor rather than two part floors in the same building. A company of ten has exactly one structural advantage, everybody within earshot of everybody, and a staircase between the sales desks and the engineers spends it for nothing. The calendar is the other thing a plan will not show you. A raw space runs ten to sixteen weeks from signature to occupancy, two to three weeks in design, three to four for DOB filing and long-lead items, six to nine in construction, and the rent clock frequently starts before the punch list closes. A prebuilt or furnished floor collapses that to two to four weeks, which is worth real money to a company still paying for wherever it sits today. 45 Broadway comes prebuilt, its glass-fronted offices and conference room already standing, so it asks $60 rather than $60 plus a fit-out you fund yourself. Allowances at this size are modest, and on a short term a landlord concedes free rent far more readily than a check written to your contractor.

Signing for ten, planning for fifteen

Most of the ten-person companies we represent are fifteen-person companies eighteen months out, and fifteen people need 2,625 square feet, $157,500 a year at $60. All five floors here run 2,500 to 2,978 feet, fourteen to seventeen desks. Only Union Square (from 2,500), FiDi (2,624), Chelsea (2,937) and Flatiron (2,940) hold anything under 3,000 on our book; NoMad starts at 5,621, Grand Central 5,230, Bryant Park 4,109, Midtown 7,092. A ten-person search here is a four-submarket search that buys a fifteen-person plate either way.

Set the term against how honest the forecast is. Three years prices worse and funds less buildout than five; what it buys is the right to be wrong cheaply. Sign five only alongside an exit: a first-offer right on contiguous space, a priced termination option, or a sublet clause negotiated rather than accepted, since landlord drafts hedge it with consent and recapture. 29 West 17th Street does it another way, a one-year plug-and-play sublease through September 2027. Expect a good guy guarantee and three to six months of security, burning down after two clean years.

Our book at this size, floor by floor

• 153 W 27th Street [Partial 3rd Floor], Chelsea: 2,978 sq ft at $44, about $10,919 a month, 17 desks
• 153 West 27th Street [Partial 11th Floor], Chelsea: 2,937 sq ft at $60, about $14,685 a month, furnished and wired, meeting room and large wet pantry
• 900 Broadway [Partial 9th Floor], Flatiron: 2,940 sq ft at $92, about $22,540 a month, loft-style, hardwood floors, light along Broadway
• 45 Broadway [Partial 12th Floor], FiDi: 2,624 sq ft at $60, about $13,120 a month, prebuilt
• 29 West 17th Street [Partial 7th Floor], Union Square: 2,500 sq ft at $60, about $12,500 a month, furnished, subleased through September 2027

Three of the five ask exactly $60. The other two are the range: between $44 in Chelsea and $92 in Flatiron sits $11,621 a month, close to $139,500 a year, on two floors within forty square feet of each other in size.

Read the $44 floor carefully. It is the cheapest thing on the list by a distance, 41 percent under the $75 median across our book, and it sits in the same building as the $60 eleventh floor. A sixteen-dollar spread inside one address is a question to ask out loud before you tour rather than after: what condition each space is in, what the landlord wants on term and on credit, and what the eleventh floor's furniture, wiring and wet pantry save a company that would otherwise be paying for all three itself.

The Union Square floor is a different instrument from the other four. A sublease hands you the sublandlord's remaining term and the prime landlord's consent process along with the keys, and it carries none of the renewal or expansion rights a direct lease would have written in. For a company that honestly cannot forecast its headcount eighteen months out, that is the point of it. For one that can, it is twelve months of rent with nothing standing at the end of them, and the five-year floors on this list deserve the harder look.

Four publish a floor plan and three have a 3D walkthrough. Send the headcount, move date and rent ceiling, and the list comes back priced.