Office Space for 30 People in Union Square

What the 175 square feet actually absorbs

The 175 square feet per person behind this page is not a desk measurement. A workstation and its chair take a fraction of it, and the rest disappears into what a floor needs before anyone can work on it: meeting rooms, phone rooms, a pantry with somewhere to sit, and the corridors connecting all of it. Circulation alone takes a share of the plan that surprises most people the first time they see a test fit.

Teams go above the allowance when they run on private offices, or when a client-facing business wants a front of house that is not also the lunch room. They go below it when desks are genuinely shared, or when a furnished floor arrives with its rooms already cut in the right places. Below about 150 square feet a head we want to see the plan first. Above 200, the money starts buying air.

What 30 seats cost here, and what they cost elsewhere

At the $115 per square foot median behind this page, 5,250 square feet asks $603,750 a year, $50,313 a month, about $1,677 per seat per month. Electric is usually billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot per year, adding $875 to $1,750 a month here, and cleaning, overtime HVAC and the escalation clause sit outside the headline too.

Priced at the $72 citywide median across our book, the same 30 people would pay $378,000 a year, $31,500 a month, which is $225,750 a year less for identical footage. Measured against the Union Square median of $87.50, the gap narrows to $459,375 a year, roughly $38,281 a month. Read the $115 as what one floor in this size band happens to ask rather than as what the neighborhood asks.

What a 30-person floor genuinely needs

Thirty people is the headcount where a floor stops being one room with a table at the end of it, and this is the plan we test against before touring anything.

• Two to three enclosed meeting rooms, one of them seating eight or more. A single room gets booked solid by the second month.
• Three to five phone rooms, cheap to build and the first missing thing the team complains about.
• A pantry with real seating, since at this size it becomes the all-hands room and the overflow meeting space.
• One floor rather than two, because thirty people split across half floors lose most of what the office was for.

Then comes the gap that undoes the arithmetic. New York leases rentable square feet, which include a share of the lobby, corridors and mechanical space, and usable area typically lands 15-25% below rentable. On 5,250 rentable feet that leaves roughly 3,938 to 4,463 feet to lay out, or 131 to 149 square feet per person. Get the loss factor in writing and run the test fit on usable feet.

Growing into it, and out of it

Grow by half and the problem changes shape. Forty-five people need about 7,875 square feet, which at $115 runs $905,625 a year, roughly $75,469 a month. Nothing on our Union Square book sits at that size, since the three floors we represent there are 2,500, 4,000 and 13,754 square feet, so a team outgrowing 5,250 feet in this submarket is choosing between a much larger whole floor and a move.

Term length is the cheapest hedge. Five to seven years buys the best economics, because improvement money and free rent are paid out of a long income stream, but it commits a 30-person company to a footprint decided at 30 people. Three years costs more per foot and hands the optionality back. Either way, three things belong in the letter of intent rather than the lease draft: a right of first offer on contiguous space, a sublease and assignment clause with consent not to be unreasonably withheld, and a defined restoration obligation.

What is on our book at this size

One floor on our Union Square book reaches this headcount, and it gets there by working harder than the 175 square foot allowance.

• 900 Broadway [Suite 202], 4,000 square feet at $115 per square foot per year, about $38,333 a month. It carries roughly 23 people at the standard allowance and 30 only on a dense open plan. A pantry and a conference room are already in place, and a Matterport walkthrough goes out before anyone visits.

Our other two Union Square floors miss in both directions. 29 West 17th Street [Partial 7th Floor] is 2,500 square feet at $60, furnished and plug and play, suiting about 14 people. 836 Broadway [Entire 2nd Floor] runs 13,754 square feet, roughly 79 desks. Thirty people is a real gap in this submarket today, so we would tour 900 Broadway alongside correctly sized floors in Flatiron and NoMad rather than wait for one to open here.