Office Space for 100 People in NYC

What the 175 square feet actually absorbs

The allowance is not a desk measurement. A workstation and its chair take a small fraction, and the rest disappears into conference rooms, phone rooms, the pantry, reception, storage and circulation. What makes 175 hold at a hundred rather than break is that shared rooms stop running ahead of headcount around fifty: twenty people need almost as many meeting rooms as forty, while a hundred need twice what fifty need.

Plan above 175 when leadership expects private offices, when clients come through often enough to need a real reception, or when the work carries rooms that lock. Plan below it when attendance is staggered and desks are booked rather than assigned. Hold at 175 otherwise: it is the number we size every floor on our book against, so our desk counts compare with each other rather than with a landlord's arithmetic.

What a hundred desks cost, and which submarket you spend it in

17,500 square feet at the $65 median across the eight matching floors is $1,137,500 a year, about $94,792 a month, roughly $948 a desk. At our $75 citywide median the same footprint runs $109,375, so the floors that hold a hundred people price well under the book.

Submarket medians move the real money. The same 17,500 feet costs about $81,667 a month at Chelsea's $56 median, $90,417 at NoMad's $62, $105,000 at Flatiron's $72, $115,208 at Midtown's $79, $127,604 at Union Square's $87.50 and $142,917 at SoHo's $98. Chelsea to SoHo, identical footprint, is $735,000 a year.

Then the inversion. Penn Plaza is the cheapest district we cover at a $52 median with nothing larger than 6,100 feet, and Hudson Yards the dearest at $200 with one 10,517-foot floor. The cheap map and the available map barely overlap here. Electric then adds $2 to $4 per foot, $35,000 to $70,000 a year, before cleaning, after-hours HVAC and escalations.

The floor at a hundred, and the feet you are not renting

One room seats leadership plus visitors, three or four more absorb the meetings a company this size generates, and we plan a phone room per twelve to fifteen people, so seven or eight. The pantry doubles as the all-hands space, which your architect should check against the place of assembly filing New York triggers at seventy-five people.

The 17,500 is rentable, and nobody sits in rentable feet. At the 15-25% loss factors ordinary in this stock it leaves 13,125 to 14,875 usable, 131 to 149 square feet a head. The spread matters more across submarkets than within one: tower plates and loft plates are measured to different conventions and quoted the same way, so get the usable figure and a test fit before comparing rents. Splitting across two floors compounds it, and buys a second pantry and a second front door.

A hundred and fifty people, and the lease that survives them

A hundred becomes a hundred and fifty faster than most plans admit, and 150 at the same allowance is 26,250 square feet, about $142,188 a month at $65. Across all eleven submarkets, exactly one floor on our book is that big today, so assume the expansion space will not be open when you need it and buy the rights now.

Term. Seven to ten years buys the improvement allowance and free rent that pay for a hundred-person buildout; five preserves flexibility and gives up both. Do the arithmetic before you sign the short one: a single month of free rent on 17,500 feet at $65 is $94,792, and every dollar of allowance is another $17,500 the landlord puts into your construction. Ownership underwrites net effective rent across the term, so the concession package shrinks in step with it. Cap the escalation in writing, and take a fixed annual bump over a porter's wage formula you cannot model.

Expansion. A right of first offer on contiguous space is granted far more readily than a fixed-price option and costs nothing, so ask which neighboring floors roll during your term, and settle the rent standard now, while you still have leverage: then-market with an appraisal backstop is a right, then-market at the landlord's determination is not. Set the response window at fifteen or twenty business days, not five. The book explains the urgency. After One Soho Square, the largest floor we have is 277 Park Avenue at 19,097 feet, and the only block offered as two contiguous floors together is 30 West 21st Street at 10,562 feet combined.

Sublease and security. Get consent written as not to be unreasonably withheld, keep affiliate transfers outside the consent requirement, and narrow the recapture right, because a landlord who can take the floor back the moment you ask to sublet has turned your assignment clause into a surrender clause. Expect a letter of credit plus a good guy guarantee. One month of rent at this size is $94,792, so a six-month letter parks $568,750 of collateral, and the burn-down after two clean years is the provision that gives it back. The guarantee should stop at rent through the day you hand over vacant possession.

What is on our book right now at this size

One floor lands squarely on the model footprint. 151 West 26th Street [12th Floor Penthouse] holds 17,610 feet at $56, about $82,180 a month, loft-style with a conference room and pantry already standing. It clears a 100-person program by 110 square feet, less than one person's allowance, so the expansion rights matter here more than the rent does. That $56 is exactly Chelsea's median and $42 under SoHo's $98, which is most of the argument for taking a hundred people west of Sixth Avenue.

1450 Broadway [Entire 4th Floor] holds 99 desks across 17,296 feet at $65, about $93,687, ten dollars under our citywide median. 277 Park Avenue [Partial 40th Floor] is the largest straight fit, 19,097 feet at $130, about $206,884, built and furnished; 275 Seventh Avenue [Entire 24th Floor] follows at 18,668 feet and $63, about $98,007. Watch what the plate does to the check: 1700 Broadway [Entire 26th Floor] asks $79, sixteen dollars a foot over 275 Seventh Avenue, and still costs $87,335, $10,672 less, because it is 5,402 feet smaller. Furnished and newly built, it holds 76.

Three miss in different directions. One Soho Square [Partial 2nd Floor] is 27,344 feet at $68, about $154,949, a 156-desk plate: right for the company you become, expensive today. 1239 Broadway [Entire 12th Floor] is 12,500 feet at $62, built for 75 to 80, with a floor plan and virtual tour. 836 Broadway [Entire 2nd Floor] is 13,754 feet in Union Square, rent unpublished. Ask us.