Office Space for 75 People in Hudson Yards

Why 175 square feet a head holds at seventy-five

The 175 is not the size of a desk. A workstation and its chair take a small share of it and the rest goes to conference rooms, phone rooms, reception, the pantry, storage and circulation. The allowance holds at this headcount because shared rooms have stopped outrunning people: a twenty-person company pays for a conference room a seventy-five-person company also pays for, spread across nearly four times the heads. From about fifty people up the ratio flattens, and 175 is where it settles.

Plan above it when leadership expects private offices, when clients come through often enough to need a real reception, or when the work needs rooms that lock. Plan below it when attendance is genuinely staggered and desks are booked rather than owned. Run that alternative before you tour, because at $200 a foot the money is enormous: seventy-five people planned at 150 square feet each fit inside 11,250, and the 1,875 feet saved is worth $375,000 a year in Hudson Yards. Nowhere else on our book does a density decision cost that much.

What 13,125 feet costs at $200, and against everything else

New York quotes rent annually per rentable square foot, so the monthly figure is one multiplication and one division: rent per foot times square footage, divided by twelve. At 13,125 square feet and $200, that is $2,625,000 a year and about $218,750 a month, which is $35,000 per person per year or $2,917 a month per head before electricity, cleaning, after-hours HVAC, insurance and escalations. Electric alone typically adds $2 to $4 a foot, $26,250 to $52,500 on this footprint.

One dollar of asking rent is worth $13,125 a year here, about $1,094 a month, so every dollar you argue off the face rent is worth $65,625 across a five-year term. A fixed 3 percent escalation, the standard landlord ask, adds $78,750 to year two on a $2,625,000 base and compounds after that, which is why capping it as a stated percentage rather than an index is usually worth more than several dollars off the ask.

Now the comparison that matters. The median across the 49 floors we represent citywide is $72 per square foot per year, so the same 13,125 feet would run $945,000 a year and $78,750 a month at the middle of the market. Hudson Yards asks $1,680,000 a year more for the identical footprint, about $140,000 every month, roughly 178 percent above the median. That single floor is the most expensive space on our whole book by a wide margin; the next dearest thing we carry anywhere is 2 Penn Plaza at $135.

The honest problem: the one Hudson Yards floor seats about sixty

Hudson Yards holds exactly one floor on our book, a partial 53rd at 66 Hudson Boulevard, The Spiral: 10,517 square feet at $200, about $2,103,400 a year and $175,283 a month. At 175 square feet a person that plans as roughly 60 desks, which is 2,608 square feet and about fifteen people short of a standard seventy-five-person requirement. This page should not pretend otherwise.

You have two honest options there. Put 75 people into 10,517 feet at 140 square feet a head, which is dense but entirely normal for an open-plan team that is light on private offices, and pay $175,283 a month, about $28,045 per person per year. Or accept that the fit is wrong and look elsewhere, because a floor you have to compress on day one leaves no room for the two extra hires that always arrive.

We also hold no description of that floor's condition, layout, exposures or what comes with it. We would rather say so than fill the gap with adjectives. Whether it is raw, pre-built or furnished changes the value of $200 considerably, and it is the first thing to establish on a tour along with the loss factor and what ownership will contribute to a buildout.

Rentable versus usable, and the rooms seventy-five people need

Nobody sits in rentable feet. At the 15 to 25 percent loss factors ordinary in this stock, 13,125 rentable leaves roughly 11,156 to 9,844 usable, which is 149 to 131 square feet a person rather than 175. On the 10,517 square foot Hudson Yards floor with 75 people in it, usable falls to roughly 8,939 to 7,888, or 119 to 105 square feet a head. That is the number your architect actually draws against, and it is the single most common reason a floor that fit on paper does not fit in plan.

Ask for the loss factor in writing and for a measured plan, since two floors quoted at the same rentable size can differ by a thousand usable feet, and a thousand feet at this headcount is six people of program.

Seventy-five people also need particular rooms: one that seats leadership plus visitors, three or four more for the meetings a company this size generates all day, a phone room for every twelve to fifteen people so five or six of them, and a pantry big enough to hold an all-hands. That last one matters more than it sounds, because seventy-five is exactly where New York's place of assembly filing is triggered, and it is a conversation to have with an architect before a lease is signed rather than after. Order the test fit early. On a floor with no plan on our record, it is the most useful thing you can buy.

Growing into it, out of it, and where else to look

Seventy-five becomes ninety sooner than most hiring plans admit, and ninety at the same allowance is 15,750 square feet; a hundred is 17,500. Neither exists in Hudson Yards today, so a company on that trajectory is either negotiating expansion rights into a building we cannot see the rest of, or planning to move again. The other direction is easier: a genuinely hybrid team lands 10 to 20 percent below a full-time footprint, 10,500 to 11,800 square feet, and at 10,517 the Hudson Yards floor is almost exactly that.

For a floor that actually fits 75 at standard density, the closest on our book is 1700 Broadway in Midtown, an entire 26th floor of 13,266 square feet asking $79, about $1,048,014 a year and $87,335 a month. That is 141 feet more than the model footprint, about 76 desks, and roughly $131,415 a month less than the Hudson Yards rate implies for the same space. Union Square's 836 Broadway, an entire 2nd floor of 13,754 square feet and about 79 desks, is the other near-exact fit, though it carries no published asking rent and the number has to be asked for.

• Just under: 1239 Broadway, Entire 12th Floor, NoMad, 12,500 sq ft at $62, about $64,583 a month, roughly 71 desks.
• Room to grow: 1450 Broadway, Entire 4th Floor, Bryant Park, 17,296 sq ft at $65, about $93,687 a month, about 99 desks; 275 Seventh Avenue, Entire 24th Floor, Chelsea, 18,668 sq ft at $63, about $98,007 a month, about 107 desks.

One neighbor is worth ruling out explicitly. Penn Plaza is the value answer next door to Hudson Yards, on the same commuter rail at a median of $52, but its floors run 5,070 to 6,100 square feet, so it cannot house seventy-five people at all today. Midtown can, Chelsea can, Bryant Park can. Send us the headcount you carry now, the one you expect in three years and the monthly number you will not cross, and we will price the Hudson Yards floor honestly against all three across the full term rather than per foot.