Office Space over $100 per Sq Ft in Union Square

What over $100 a foot buys in Union Square right now

Three floors sit on our Union Square book, two publish a rent, and one clears $100. It is the highest rate in the submarket, so this page describes a ceiling rather than a range.

• 900 Broadway, Suite 202: 4,000 square feet at $115 per square foot per year, $460,000 annually, about $38,333 a month, roughly 23 desks.

Twenty-three desks at 175 square feet allows for meeting rooms, phone booths, a pantry and circulation; a denser open plan takes about 29, private offices closer to 18. We show a pantry, a conference room, hardwood floors and a Matterport walkthrough, and no floor plan, so a measured plan comes first.

Over $100 is a wide door: the same 4,000 feet at $100 would run $60,000 a year less, $5,000 every month.

The monthly math, worked so you can run it on any floor

Rent is quoted annually per rentable square foot, so the number a finance team needs is one multiplication and one division: 4,000 times $115 is $460,000 a year, divided by twelve about $38,333 a month.

Per seat the argument settles faster. Across 23 desks, $460,000 is exactly $20,000 a desk a year, near $1,667 a month; at 29 open-plan seats it falls to $15,862, at 18 with private offices it climbs to $25,556. The rent never moves. The number a board sees moves a great deal.

One dollar of ask is $4,000 a year here, so five dollars off saves $100,000 over a five-year term before escalations compound. And 4,000 is rentable, not usable: loss factor commonly runs 15-25%, leaving 3,400 to 3,000 usable feet, so $115 is really $135 to $153 a foot you can furnish.

What the $115 does not include

Four costs sit outside the $115, and budgets break on them.

• Electricity is almost never in base rent, arriving as a submeter or a fixed $2 to $4 a foot a year, $8,000 to $16,000 here, $667 to $1,333 a month on top.
• Cleaning follows building standard, covering desks and trash but stopping short of pantry refuse, interior glass and extra porter hours. This suite has a pantry, so we write that carve-out down.
• Escalations do the quiet damage. Taxes pass through over a base year fixed in the lease, and that base year matters more than the percentage. Operating expenses sit on top of the annual step in base rent, commonly 2.5-3%: 3% adds $13,800 in year two and takes year five to $517,734.
• Buildout above any allowance is the largest of the four and likeliest to go missing from a model: furniture, cabling, audiovisual and the architect's fee sit outside it, every $10 a foot of shortfall is $40,000, and DOB filing sets the move-in date.

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

Face rent moves least at the top of a submarket, since the number signed on the only floor above $100 gets quoted on the next one. Four things build the gap between asking and taking rent.

• Free rent costs ownership income for a stretch rather than a permanent mark on the rent roll. A month is $38,333, three across five years is $115,000, worth $5.75 a foot, making $115 behave like $109.25.
• The allowance matters as much in mechanics as in size: progress payments fund the job as it runs, reimbursement on completion makes the tenant bank it first, and one amortized into rent is a loan.
• Security locks up cash. Six months against $38,333 is $230,000 in a letter of credit, three frees $115,000, and a burn-down after clean payment is worth asking for, as is a good guy guarantee.
• Term buys the rest, since landlords underwrite concessions across a whole deal. We also cap controllable operating expenses and push the base tax year late.

How $115 sits against $75 citywide and $87.50 in Union Square

The median across our New York book is $75 a foot, so this floor stands $40 above the middle, 53% more. Union Square's own median is $87.50, itself 17% above the city, putting $115 roughly 31% above its submarket and at the top of a $60 to $115 range.

Only two of those three publish a rent, so $87.50 is the midpoint of $60 and $115, not the middle of a deep market. Three floors is a shortlist, and above $100 a shortlist of one.

The other priced floor, 29 West 17th Street's partial 7th, is 2,500 feet at $60, about $12,500 a month. At this footprint the closer test sits outside the submarket: 110 Greene Street in SoHo, 3,750 feet at $95, near $29,688 a month, and 54 West 21st Street in Flatiron, 3,960 feet at $72, $23,760.

So the premium buys submarket and floor, not square footage, and a tour prices it. The band suits a team of about 23 that wants Union Square specifically, the 4/5/6, N/Q/R/W and L all at 14th Street, with room to carry electricity, escalations and fit-out above $460,000 a year.