Penn Plaza vs Hudson Yards: Office Space Compared

The $148 gap, and the narrower one underneath it

Penn Plaza's median is $52 per square foot per year and the Hudson Yards median is its only floor at $200, a gap of $148 a foot with Penn Plaza about 74% below. Against the $75 median across the 46 priced floors on our book, Penn Plaza sits 28% under and 66 Hudson Boulevard sits 178% over. The Hudson Yards number is one asking rent with no distribution behind it, so it describes a landlord's view of a single floor rather than a district.

The Penn Plaza median deserves the same scrutiny. A median of three floors is the middle one, and here the three are $50, $52 and $135. That $85 spread is wider in dollar terms than all nine Chelsea floors put together, so the $52 headline describes two floors in one building rather than the submarket's ceiling.

Run the comparison at the finished end and it tightens sharply. 2 Penn Plaza's partial 17th is a brand new high-end prebuilt with one executive office, three offices, a phone room, a conference room, open seating for 21 workstations, and reception and lounge areas: 5,070 square feet at $135, about $57,038 a month. That is what Penn Plaza puts up against Hudson Yards, 33% cheaper a foot and $118,245 a month cheaper whole.

Three floors, two products, one floor next door

• Penn Plaza: 3 floors, 5,070 to 6,100 square feet, roughly 29 to 35 desks at the 175 square feet per person we plan around, $50 to $135.
• Hudson Yards: 1 floor, 10,517 square feet, about 60 desks, $200.

At the value end sit two floors in one building: 213 West 35th Street's 10th, 5,250 square feet at $50, about $21,875 a month, and its 11th, 6,100 square feet at $52, about $26,433 a month. Our record notes a terrace, a conference room and furniture on the 11th and carries no written description for either, so what those floors look like is a tour question. The 10th is a gated listing on our site, so ask us for its detail directly.

The size ceiling decides the rest. Nothing we hold in Penn Plaza reaches past 6,100 square feet, about 35 desks, so a team of sixty has one option here and it is the $200 floor. That is a gap in our Penn Plaza book rather than a recommendation, and the right response is more Penn Plaza stock, not a bigger budget.

Same trains, mostly the same walk

Penn Plaza is served by the 1/2/3, A/C/E, LIRR and NJ Transit. Hudson Yards has the 7 at 34th Street Hudson Yards, with the A/C/E and LIRR at Penn.

This is the pairing where transit stops being a differentiator. Two of the three entries in the Hudson Yards transit string name Penn, another way of saying that much of a Hudson Yards commute ends at the station a Penn Plaza commute ends at. The 7 is the line Hudson Yards has that Penn Plaza does not, and NJ Transit is the one Penn Plaza has that the Hudson Yards string does not name.

Which sharpens the whole page. When two submarkets share an access story, the rent difference is buying building and address rather than commute, and $148 a foot for the walk between them is a decision worth making deliberately. Hudson Yards lists Penn Plaza first among its neighbors and Penn Plaza lists Hudson Yards among its own. Walk it once before you choose.

Our recommendation by tenant type

Under 35 desks with rent binding, take Penn Plaza at $50 to $52. Thirty people on 213 West 35th Street's 11th floor cost about $10,573 each per year in rent; sixty on the Hudson Yards floor cost about $35,057 each. Neither is a compromise on access, which is what makes the first number hard to argue with.

For the 20 to 30 person company that wants a new, finished plan at a Penn Station address, 2 Penn Plaza at $135 is the argument we make, and we make it directly against Hudson Yards: $684,450 a year against $2,103,400, for a floor already built and documented down to the workstation count.

Hudson Yards is the right answer for a company of about sixty that needs one floor in new construction and can commit to 10,517 square feet from day one. Below that headcount, and for anyone still sizing the business, we would take Penn Plaza and spend a slice of the difference on the installation, since $148 a foot funds a buildout several times over. We say so with the Spiral floor on our own book.

The practical next step

These two are adjacent, so an afternoon covers all four floors with time to spare, and the walk between them is itself part of the test.

The tour matters more on this pairing than most, because two of the three Penn Plaza floors and the Hudson Yards floor reach us without a written description. Ask what condition each is delivered in, what the landlord will fund and what conveys, and press hardest on the 10th floor at 213 West 35th, since it is gated and its detail travels by request.

Ask for usable square footage next to the rentable figure everywhere: a 20% loss factor turns $200 rentable into $250 per usable foot and $52 into $65, and the factor varies building to building. Then judge on taking rent rather than asking rent, since free months, allowance and the escalation base year move these deals further than the headline does.