Office Space over $100 per Sq Ft in Flatiron

What over $100 a foot buys in Flatiron right now

Six floors sit on our Flatiron book, five publishing a rent, and exactly one clears $100. This band is the ceiling of the submarket rather than a range inside it.

• 30 West 21st Street, penthouse floor: 5,250 square feet at $115 per square foot per year, $603,750 annually, about $50,313 a month, roughly 30 desks at the 175 square feet per person we plan against.
• Our record carries one photograph and publishes no amenity list, floor plan or walkthrough, so condition is the first tour question and a fit-out line stays in the model.

Thirty desks already allows for meeting rooms, phone booths, a pantry and circulation; a denser plan takes about 38, private offices closer to 23. The same building carries the entire ninth and tenth floors together, 10,562 square feet with no published rent, worth knowing to anyone expecting to outgrow 30 seats.

The monthly number, and how to run it on any floor

New York quotes rent annually per rentable square foot, so the number a finance team needs is one multiplication and one division. Multiply 5,250 by $115 for $603,750 a year, then divide by twelve for $50,313 a month.

A dollar of asking rent is worth $5,250 a year here, so five dollars off the ask saves $26,250 a year and $131,250 over a five-year term. Per seat, $50,313 across 30 desks is about $1,677 a month, the figure that maps onto a headcount plan.

The 5,250 is rentable rather than usable, since loss factor pushes corridor, lobby and restrooms back onto the tenants paying for them. Ask for a measured plan and compare cost per usable seat.

What the $115 does not include

Five costs sit outside the $115, and budgets in this band break underneath the headline rather than at it.

• Electric rarely sits inside base rent, arriving as a submeter with an administration factor or a fixed $2 to $4 per square foot per year, $10,500 to $21,000 a year on 5,250 feet.
• Cleaning gets read line by line, since pantry cleanup, interior glass and debris are commonly carved out of nightly service.
• Tax escalations run from a base year fixed in the lease, and the base year matters more than the percentage: one struck before full assessment bites hardest by year three.
• Operating expense escalations come over a base year or on a porter's wage formula, on top of the annual step in base rent, commonly 2.5-3%. A 3% step adds about $18,113 in year two and carries year five to roughly $679,526, about $56,627 a month.
• Buildout above any allowance is the largest of the five, with DOB filing on the critical path and a custom fit-out running ten to sixteen weeks where a finished floor needs two to four.

What moves at $115 a foot, and where we push

Face rent moves least at the top of a submarket, since what gets signed on the only floor above $100 sets the quote on the next one back. Five items build the gap to taking rent.

• Free rent goes first, costing a stretch of income rather than a mark on the rent roll. A month is $50,313, and three months across five years brings the effective rent to $109.25 a foot.
• The allowance is the biggest item on a floor that needs work, and its mechanics matter as much as its size: progress payments fund the job as it runs, an amortized allowance is a loan at interest.
• Security locks up real cash here, since six months against a $50,313 obligation is $301,878 in a letter of credit. We argue the amount down and the burn-down in.
• Term buys the other concessions, so a company that might want the 10,562 square feet this building also carries should trade years now for an expansion right.
• Caps decide the back half: a stated percentage rather than an index, a capped pass-through, a fully assessed tax base year. The good guy guarantee is arguable in signer and duration too.

How $115 sits against the market, and who the band suits

Our New York book runs to a $75 median asking rent, so this floor sits $40 above it, about 53% more. Flatiron's own median is $72 across the six floors we carry, three dollars under the city, so the premium over the submarket is 60% rather than the 53% the citywide number gives.

The check says the same. At $50,313 a month this is the largest monthly obligation in our Flatiron book, ahead of $29,770 at 137 East 25th Street, $23,833 at 276 Fifth Avenue, $23,760 at 54 West 21st Street and $22,540 at 900 Broadway. And 276 Fifth is larger than the penthouse at 5,500 square feet, asking $52, $26,480 a month less. None of that gap is a size gap.

The premium buys building and floor, and a tour prices it. The band suits a company of about 30 that wants the penthouse floor of a Flatiron building and can carry electric, escalations and a fit-out on top of $603,750 a year. Below it sit $92 at 900 Broadway, about $22,540 a month for 17 desks, and a furnished $72 sublease at 54 West 21st Street running to June 2027.