Office Space over $100 per Sq Ft in Midtown

What the band buys in Midtown right now

Four floors sit on our Midtown book and one prices above $100 per square foot per year.

• 520 Madison Avenue, partial 21st floor: 7,092 rentable square feet at $125 per square foot per year, about $73,875 a month, roughly 41 desks at 175 square feet a person, with a pantry, conference room and reception.

Seat count moves with the plan rather than the lease: about 51 in a tight open layout, closer to 32 once private offices go in. It is a partial floor, so a demising line, a shared landing and a rentable figure carrying common area come with it. Confirm each on the tour.

The other three sit below it. 1450 Broadway's entire 4th asks $65 on 17,296 square feet, about $93,687 a month; 1700 Broadway's entire 26th asks $79 on 13,266 feet, about $87,335; 45 West 45th's entire 10th is priced on request. The dearest floor per square foot in Midtown is thus the cheapest of the four by the month, because it is much the smallest.

The monthly math, worked plainly

New York quotes rent annually per rentable square foot, so the monthly figure is one multiplication and one division. 7,092 times $125 is $886,500 a year, and divided by twelve, $73,875 a month. Those two steps work on any floor you are shown.

On this footprint each dollar of annual asking rent costs about $591 a month. The $25 between $125 and the bottom of the band is $14,775 a month; the $50 up from the $75 citywide median is $29,550.

Per seat it lands harder: $73,875 across 41 desks is roughly $1,802 a person a month, about $1,449 at 51, closer to $2,309 at 32. One caution: 7,092 is rentable, and the usable area your desks stand on is smaller by the building's loss factor.

What the asking rent does not include

Budgets in this band rarely break on the rent. They break on the costs just outside it.

• Electric is rarely inside base rent: the floor is either submetered or charged as an inclusion of $2 to $4 per square foot per year, $1,182 to $2,364 a month here.
• Cleaning is worth reading rather than assuming, since nightly service commonly stops short of pantries, interior glass and construction debris.
• Real estate tax escalations run off a base year in the lease, after which you pay a share of every increase above it, and a base year agreed before a reassessment costs dollars per foot by year three.
• Operating expense escalations arrive as a pass-through over that same base year or as a porter's wage formula, on top of the annual step in base rent of 2.5% to 3%.
• Buildout past the allowance is the largest of the five. Improvement money is paid against approved work, so anything past it is your cash or gets amortized into rent at interest. A built floor cuts that exposure, though cabling, furniture and IT still land on you.

What moves in a negotiation above $100

Face rent moves least at the top of the market, since ownership protects the number that prices the next floor in the building. A landlord defending a high rent will spend to defend it, so concessions here run richer than at the $75 middle of our book.

• Free rent goes first, because it costs an owner a period of income rather than a permanent markdown, and at $125 one free month here is worth $73,875.
• The improvement allowance is quoted per rentable foot, so every $10 of it funds $70,920 of work across 7,092 feet. Ask for a work letter and progress payments.
• Term is the currency concessions are bought with, so trade the years deliberately and take a renewal option back in exchange.
• Escalation caps decide what year seven costs: a stated percentage rather than an index, a ceiling on the operating pass-through, a fully assessed tax base year.
• The good guy guarantee is standard in New York and negotiable in every part, from who signs it to the notice you owe before vacating.

Where this band sits, and who it suits

Our New York book carries a median asking rent of $75 per square foot per year, and this floor asks $125, about two thirds more. The same $73,875 a month spent at that median would rent about 11,820 square feet instead of 7,092.

Midtown's own median is $125, so this floor asks roughly 4% above the middle of its submarket. Of the 49 floors on our book, eleven ask above $100 and the highest asks $135; this is the only one in Midtown.

Per head: about $1,802 a month a desk here, against roughly $1,149 on the 26th at 1700 Broadway and $946 on the 4th at 1450 Broadway. That spread is what the address and a built floor cost per employee.

It suits a team of about forty that needs the address working on its behalf and wants finished space rather than four months of construction. Companies buying area rather than the address do better one band down, or in Bryant Park, Grand Central and Penn Plaza.