Office Space over $100 per Sq Ft in NYC

What the band buys across the city right now

Six floors, 31,907 square feet, 184 desks, $318,386 a month, at 173.4 square feet per person. Nothing under 4,000 feet and nothing over 7,092.

• 520 Madison Avenue, partial 21st, Midtown: 7,092 feet at $125, $73,875 a month, 41 desks, a trading layout with 44 workstations and two conference rooms.
• 520 Broadway, entire 10th, SoHo: 5,539 feet at $125, $57,698 a month, 32 desks, a new high-end prebuild delivering Q1 2027, three sides of light.
• 30 West 21st Street, penthouse, Flatiron: 5,250 feet at $115, $50,313 a month, 30 desks.
• 60 Charlton Street, partial 8th, SoHo: 5,003 feet at $120, $50,030 a month, 29 desks, a plug-and-play sublease, furniture included, 16 workstations, three phone rooms.
• 4 World Trade Center, partial 44th, FiDi: 5,023 feet at $115, $48,137 a month, 29 desks, partially furnished prebuilt, column-free, five offices and two conference rooms.
• 900 Broadway, Suite 202, Union Square: 4,000 feet at $115, $38,333 a month, 23 desks, pantry, conference room, hardwood floors, 3D tour.

The monthly math, worked plainly

Rent is quoted annually per rentable foot, so the month is one multiplication and one division: 5,023 times $115 is $577,645, over twelve $48,137 at 4 World Trade Center. Faster, divide the rent by twelve: at $120 that is exactly $10 a foot a month, so 60 Charlton's 5,003 feet is $50,030.

At this group's 173.4 feet a person, every dollar of asking rent is about $14.45 per desk per month, which brackets the band between $1,662 and $1,806 a seat. Ours run $1,660 to $1,803.

Those footages are rentable, not usable, and four of the six are partial floors or suites carrying core and corridor nobody occupies. Five points of loss factor at 520 Madison is 355 feet, about $44,000 a year, which is why we price off a measured plan.

What the asking rent does not include

Budgets break underneath the asking rent, on four costs the headline hides.

• Electric is seldom inside base rent, arriving as a submeter or a fixed $2 to $4 a foot a year: $8,000 to $16,000 at 900 Broadway, $14,184 to $28,368 at 520 Madison.
• Cleaning reads line by line: nightly service covers desks and trash, while pantry cleanup, interior glass and construction debris are carved out.
• Escalations arrive in layers: an annual step, commonly 2.5-3%, plus tax and operating pass-throughs over a base year that matters more than the rate. At 3%, $125 reaches $140.69 by year five, adding roughly $274,000 at 520 Madison over five years.
• Buildout above any allowance goes missing from models most often. On the prebuilt floors the landlord already spent it; on a raw floor it is the largest number in the deal, and it runs on a DOB filing schedule that is not yours.

What moves at these rents, and what we push on

Face rent is defended hardest above $100: the signed number becomes the comp on the next floor.

• Free rent goes first, costing income for a stretch rather than a permanently lower rent roll. Six months on a five-year term at 30 West 21st turns $115 into $103.50 effective, about $45,282 a month.
• The improvement allowance is the weak lever on a finished floor, where the money is already in the ground; at 60 Charlton and 4 World Trade Center we argue it as a furniture credit.
• 60 Charlton is a sublease, so the term ends when the master lease does and nothing ties you to ownership without a recognition agreement. At 520 Broadway, a Q1 2027 delivery makes commencement the argument.
• Security moves in five places: the letter of credit amount, whether it burns down, who signs the good guy guarantee, the notice owed before vacating, and any strip-out obligation.

How the band sits against the city and each submarket

The median across our New York book is $75 a foot. Inside this band it is $117.50, and the cheapest floor here clears $75 by $40.

Against each submarket's own median the same dollars sit differently. $125 at 520 Madison is $46 over Midtown's $79, and in SoHo $125 at 520 Broadway and $120 at 60 Charlton clear an $85 median by $40 and $35. $115 at 30 West 21st is $43 above Flatiron's $72, $115 at 4 World Trade Center $43.50 above FiDi's $71.50, and 900 Broadway's $115 is the narrowest gap, $27.50 over Union Square's $87.50.

Half the book holds nothing in the band: Chelsea tops out at $64, NoMad at $62, Penn Plaza at $52, Grand Central at $89, Bryant Park's one floor at $96. The cost of insisting is desks: $50,030 a month buys 29 seats at 60 Charlton and about 61 at Chelsea's $56 median.

What comes back is a finished floor and occupancy on day one rather than in month seven. Teams that need both should pay for both.