Office Space for Lease in Park Ave/Madison Square

Last spring we gave every client on these blocks the same advice, and at the time it was good advice. The money is in the two towers on the park. If you can’t stomach Madison Avenue, walk three blocks west and take the loft. Same neighborhood, same trains, nobody’s the wiser.

That advice is expiring, and June is when it stopped working. Moinian leased roughly seventy thousand square feet at 60 Madison Avenue in about two weeks. Prewar building. No glass, no roof garden, no Boulud downstairs. The tenants were AI companies taking entire floors.

Those are the same firms that would have knifed each other over One Madison eighteen months ago. Now they’re signing for brick.

Then the quarterly numbers landed and made it official. For the first time this cycle, more Midtown South leasing happened in the old buildings than in the good ones. Not by much, but it happened, in the submarket everyone swears only wants glass.

So here’s where that leaves you. The two towers are still full and still cost what they cost. The lofts we used to call the value play are having their moment, which is wonderful for the people who own them and considerably less wonderful for you.

There’s still a real gap between the glass and the brick. It’s narrower than it was a year ago and it’s closing from the bottom up, so knowing exactly how wide it still is, building by building, is the whole job. It’s what we do all day.

If you’d rather see what’s actually open before reading another word, the listings are right there.

Park Avenue South and Madison Square Office Market Overview

One thing explains these blocks and it hasn’t changed in two years: AI reset the price of office space here first. What changed is that AI ran out of room.

Manhattan just posted its busiest six months of leasing since 2002. Availability is the lowest it’s been since the fall of 2020, and it’s been falling or holding flat for nine straight quarters. Landlords can feel it. They’re marking asking rents up more than twice as often as they’re marking them down.

AI firms took more space in the last three months than in all of last year combined. That appetite hasn’t cooled a degree. It simply has nowhere left to go on Madison Avenue, which is why the interesting deals are now landing a block or two off it. For the wider view, our Midtown South page carries the district numbers.

Four Things to Know Before You Sit Across From a Landlord

• The towers are closed. One Madison and 11 Madison have been full since March, and SL Green turned around and refinanced One Madison for $1.65 billion, which is what you do when you’re certain. If your heart’s set on a new floor over the park, you’re waiting for somebody to hand space back.
• The lofts got discovered. That 60 Madison run wasn’t a fluke, it was the quarter in miniature. Prewar buildings with big floors near the park now compete for the same tenants as the glass, and they’re winning some of them. It’s also why your loft quote came back higher than you were expecting.
• The cheap sublease is basically gone. Manhattan sublet space shrank by almost a quarter over the past year and now sits below where it was before the pandemic. The bargain that rescued tenants in 2023 got absorbed. A few still trade, and when one surfaces here it’s gone in days, so you have to be ready before you see it.
• The year’s biggest AI lease went somewhere else. Anthropic just took an entire 466,000-square-foot building over in Hudson Square. That isn’t these blocks cooling off, it’s these blocks being full. Nobody placing four hundred thousand feet is shopping Madison Square Park, because there’s nothing here that size to put them in.

Manhattan H1 2026 leasing of 22.8M SF (strongest first half since 2002), availability of 13.0% (lowest since October 2020, against an 18.2% peak in February 2024), nine consecutive quarters of tightening or flat supply, sublet supply down 22% year over year to roughly 9% below pre-pandemic, Q2 AI leasing of about 800,000 SF (more than all of 2025 combined), and Midtown South repricing (11.1% of direct space marked up against 4.9% marked down) from Colliers, Q2 2026 (July 1, 2026). Anthropic’s 466,000 SF lease at 330 Hudson Street from The Real Deal (July 8, 2026). One Madison’s $1.65 billion refinancing and both towers reaching 100% leased from SL Green (March 2026).

How Much Does Office Space on Park Avenue South Cost?

Anyone who answers that with a single number is selling you something. A trophy floor on the park asks a hundred and eighty a foot. A prewar loft three blocks west asks sixty. Both are honest quotes for the same neighborhood on the same subway line.

The averages give you the shape and not much else. Midtown South runs somewhere between eighty-one and eighty-six dollars depending on whose report you’re holding, and Class A just crossed a hundred for the first time.

Those firms disagree because they draw the neighborhood differently, which is worth knowing before a landlord quotes you whichever one helps him most. Our habit is to ask which report a number came out of before we bother arguing with it.

The ceiling is the two towers, where One Madison asks $120 to $180 and 11 Madison sits near $90. The floor is out on the side streets and the Flatiron edge, where you can still find loft space in the sixties. Everything else lives in between, and that middle is filling in fast.

So the question was never really the price. It’s what the difference buys you.

If a Madison Avenue address helps you recruit engineers or reassure a client, pay for it, and we’ll tell you to your face it’s money well spent. If it does neither, take the loft and keep the difference. Plenty of very good businesses do exactly that and never look back.

Before you tour anything, run your headcount through our office space calculator. Half the tenants we meet are shopping for thirty percent more space than they need, and on a ten-year lease that mistake gets expensive.

Class A and the Trophy Towers

Class A here means Madison Avenue plus a handful of rebuilt buildings on Park Avenue South, and One Madison is the one everybody asks about. SL Green stacked a gleaming tower on an older base, filled it to the last inch, and Harvey alone grew into 185,000 feet on the way there.

The rest of that roster is a velvet rope: IBM, Franklin Templeton, Palo Alto Networks, FanDuel, Sigma, Coinbase. It asks $120 to $180 and it knows precisely what it’s worth, which is why the negotiation there tends to be short.

Which is why we usually walk clients one block up to 11 Madison instead. It’s the old Metropolitan Life North Building, Art Deco, hundred-thousand-foot floors, and it filled up right alongside its flashier neighbor without any of the noise.

UBS took the space Credit Suisse used to hold, next door to Sony Music, WME, Suntory, and Pinterest. By any measure a client actually cares about, that’s the same address as One Madison.

The kicker is the price. Eleven Madison asks around ninety dollars, roughly half its neighbor, and Clay signed a ten-year deal there in March at exactly that number. If you can fill a big floor, that’s the smarter money, and we’ll happily make the case to you in person.

Down on Park Avenue South, 315 is the sharpest play: a crisp prewar rebuild with an Equinox in the base and a tenant list that reads like a venture fund’s portfolio. 360 is BXP’s rebuild with a roof terrace worth the elevator ride.

Then there’s 345, which stands alone. It’s the old Armory, gutted and reopened as a life-sciences building, and it’s the only address in Midtown South with working wet labs a block off a park.

If you’re trying to sort a genuine trophy from a building that merely charges like one, read our piece on what actually separates trophy buildings before you sign anything. Our list of the best Class A towers in Midtown is worth a look too if you’re weighing these blocks against the ones uptown.

Class B and Loft Space, Where the Market Actually Went

Strip out the trophy headlines and this is where the leasing happens. It’s also where this year’s story lives.

Sixty Madison is the clearest example. Moinian filled it in a fortnight and the tenants weren’t who you’d expect in a prewar building. Tenex Labs took the twelfth floor and the penthouse. Pace and GovWell, both AI companies, each took a floor of their own.

The stock is the reason any of it works. Park Avenue South, lower Fifth, and the Broadway blocks of NoMad are lined with early-1900s lofts: high ceilings, oversized windows, open plates. Everything a creative or tech tenant wants, and everything a 2008 glass box can’t fake.

The American Woolen Building at 225 and the Everett Building at 200 are the classics on the strip. 1133 Broadway, the old St. James, holds down the NoMad end with smaller, characterful floors.

One piece of advice worth more than the letter grade: ignore the label. A renovated loft here can wear a B and out-ask a Class A tower in Midtown, because what you’re paying for is ceiling height, light, a usable plate, and the block.

None of that is a letter an appraiser typed into a spreadsheet, and our explainer on what Class A, B, and C actually mean walks through where the whole system falls apart in a loft market.

Two buildings on the same block will quote you wildly different numbers, so tour them yourself and don’t put much faith in the average. This is the same stock that pulls tenants into SoHo and Chelsea, often at similar money, which is worth knowing when you’re deciding how far the search should stretch.

Class C and Value Space, and an Honest Warning

The genuine bargains still sit off the main strip: the side streets running east toward Lexington, the older NoMad buildings, and the Flatiron blocks heading west toward Sixth. Small firms, early-stage startups, nonprofits, back-office teams. For plenty of tenants it’s still the right answer.

The warning is that this is exactly the space the market came for this year. Availability has narrowed sharply across Manhattan’s older buildings, and Class B asking rents citywide just closed a quarter at the highest average anyone has recorded.

Nobody publishes a clean Class C number for this submarket either, so when a landlord hands you one precise figure like it’s settled fact, keep your guard up. If price is genuinely what’s driving you, Downtown and the Financial District still run well below these blocks, and Lower Manhattan is having its own quiet recovery.

Class B taking 42.0% of Midtown South leasing against 40.8% for Class A, and TAMI tenants accounting for 61.4% of new leases 10,000 SF and greater (up from 25.2% in H1 2025), from Cushman & Wakefield, Q2 2026. Class B leasing citywide running 28% above last year and Class B asking rents ending Q2 at the highest average on record from CoStar (July 2026). The 60 Madison leases (Tenex Labs 25,000 SF, Pace 17,500 SF, GovWell 17,500 SF, The Full Picture 8,000 SF) from Commercial Observer, Connect CRE, and Mann Report (June 2026).

Concessions, Where the Real Money Hides

This is where tenants leave the most on the table, every single time. They grind on the asking rent, claw back three dollars, feel like they’ve won, and wave straight through the two things that actually move the math.

Those two things are the free months and the build-out money, and both are shrinking. Free rent on new Manhattan deals is down to about a year, the thinnest since 2019, and improvement allowances have flattened out around a hundred and forty a foot.

The landlords know it. Last quarter they marked up more than twice as much Midtown South space as they marked down, and they’ll be pleasant about it while they do.

None of which means you have no room. It means the room is narrower and you have to know which buildings still have it, which is the whole argument for touring more than one and for having somebody in your corner who saw last month’s comps.

Two things to fix in your head before you sit down. Your effective rent lands well below the face rent once you count the free months, which our breakdown of rising landlord concessions walks through in full.

The other is that a build-out check is only worth what it actually pays to build. Our primer on tenant improvement allowances covers how that money gets structured, and you want to settle who’s covering the build-out before anybody starts talking numbers.

Budget past the rent too. Electricity gets billed three different ways and the spread matters, as our guide to office electricity costs explains. Your landlord will want liability coverage naming them, and the security deposit runs higher for a young company than a profitable one, usually softened by a Good Guy Guarantee.

If the term is your sticking point, our guide to three, five, and ten-year leases lays out the trade-offs. If there’s any chance you outgrow the space, negotiate your sublease and assignment rights now instead of fighting for them in year three, and skim the lease clauses that quietly cost the most before the redline comes back.

Who Leases Here, and Where You’ll Fit

On these blocks the building picks the tenant about as often as the tenant picks the building. The towers and the rebuilt Class A on Park Avenue South pull AI, tech, and finance, while the lab building pulls biotech.

The old lofts pull creative shops, media, design firms, and now the AI companies that couldn’t get into the towers. The cheaper side streets pull startups and nonprofits, though that pool is thinning. Find your row and you’ve narrowed the search before you’ve toured a thing.

Running a small team? This isn’t the cheapest corner of Manhattan and we won’t insult you by pretending otherwise, least of all this year. The side streets and the blocks west of Park still make it more reachable than the AI headlines suggest, though that window is closing.

If you’re still weighing neighborhoods against each other, our guide to the best NYC areas for small businesses is the place to start. If you’re finally trading a coworking membership for a space of your own, we wrote up how to make that jump without regretting it.

The Buildings, and What You Actually Get

Two things you can’t buy in Midtown at any price: Madison Square Park out your front door, and the restaurants ringing it, from Eleven Madison Park inside the tower to Gramercy Tavern around the corner. That’s the whole pitch and it’s a good one.

The new towers set the amenity bar absurdly high. The older buildings answered the only way they could, by gutting their lobbies and stocking up on move-in-ready suites, and it has worked better than anyone expected. It breaks into three tiers.

Trophy: One Madison and 11 Madison. Full-block towers, modern systems, park views, serious dining downstairs, roof gardens, private lounges. The top of Midtown South with no qualifier needed, and both full.

Renovated Class A: 315, 360, and 345. Updated lobbies and mechanicals, an Equinox in the base of 315, a roof terrace at 360, lab-ready floors at 345, and the 6 train waiting at the corner.

Class B loft and value: 60 Madison, 225, 200, 1133 Broadway, the side streets. Prewar character, high ceilings, big windows, attended lobbies, and a deepening supply of prebuilt suites, all a short walk from the park. This is where the market moved.

Buildings Worth Knowing

• One Madison Avenue: SL Green’s 1.4-million-foot rebuild on the park, 100% leased, anchored by IBM, Franklin Templeton, and Harvey. Asks $120 to $180. Refinanced for $1.65 billion in early 2026, which tells you what the owner thinks happens next. (No building profile yet. Create one and link here.)
• 60 Madison Avenue: Moinian’s prewar loft on the park’s north edge and the best story on these blocks this year. Roughly seventy thousand feet signed in a fortnight to Tenex Labs, Pace, GovWell, and The Full Picture. Full-floor plates, upgraded fiber, move-in ready. Berkshire Blanket has been a tenant since 2014, so this isn’t a flip. (No building profile yet. Create one and link here.)
• 11 Madison Avenue: The 2.3-million-foot Art Deco landmark, the old MetLife North, hundred-thousand-foot floors, a roster running from UBS and Sony Music to Clay and Tempus. Asks around ninety. The value play among the towers and the one we argue for most often.
• 345 Park Avenue South: Deerfield’s Cure building, the old Armory gutted into a life-sciences campus with working wet labs a block off the park. Deerfield, ProTara, and Helaina are in it. Nothing else in the submarket offers this.
• 315 Park Avenue South: The best-in-class prewar rebuild, Equinox in the base, tenants from PitchBook to Gemini to Cadre. If you want renovated Class A without the Madison Avenue invoice, start here.
• 360 Park Avenue South: BXP’s repositioned Class A at 26th, rebuilt from the studs, roof terrace included.
• 225 Park Avenue South (American Woolen Building): A prewar loft landmark and a classic creative address. It lost Meta, sat heavy through 2024, and has been filling back in as tech demand returned.
• 200 Park Avenue South (Everett Building): A prewar corner loft looking out over Union Square Park at the south end of the strip.
• 1133 Broadway (St. James Building): A landmarked NoMad loft with smaller, characterful floors. The right building for a ten-person firm that wants the address without a full floor.
• Nomad Tower (1250 Broadway): Global Holdings’ amenity-rich Class A at Broadway and 32nd, popular with finance, fintech, and professional services.

Ground-floor retail on the park frontage and along Broadway and Fifth is some of the highest-traffic in the neighborhood, and it’s a completely different search. See all Midtown South buildings or filter live listings by size and price.

Who Owns These Buildings, and Why You Should Care

Who holds the keys matters as much as which building you pick, because no two of these owners play the same game. That isn’t a throwaway line. It’s most of what a good tenant broker is actually selling you.

SL Green owns the trophy tier outright, and with both buildings full they’re negotiating from comfort rather than need. Deerfield runs 345 as a life-sciences campus instead of an office building, so expect an entirely different conversation over there.

Moinian is the name to watch. Four leases at 60 Madison in two weeks, another ninety-five thousand feet at 245 Fifth, a steady run at 450-460 Park Avenue South. They’ve built the deepest loft book on these blocks and they move fast when they like a tenant.

Columbia Property Trust, now under PIMCO, treats 315 like a flagship. BXP rebuilt 360 from the studs. Global Holdings owns Nomad Tower.

The real value of a broker is knowing which of these owners deals straight and which one grinds you on the last dollar, and that’s worth more than any listing site. Our rundown of the biggest landlords in NYC lays out the wider field.

Transportation and Commuting to Park Avenue South and Madison Square

The transit here is genuinely excellent, and that’s not filler to pad a page. It’s a real reason to sign a lease on these blocks, and it’s worth more every year that landlords elsewhere discover a building ten minutes from a train has a problem.

The 6 runs directly under Park Avenue South, so the spine of the neighborhood sits on a subway line. Penn and Grand Central are both a short ride out, which spares your suburban people the daily headache it becomes somewhere like Columbus Circle.

Before the commute turns into an office-wide argument, settle it with our commute calculator and everyone’s home address. It ends the debate faster than a meeting will.

Typical off-peak door-to-station estimates that vary with service and time of day (Metro Manhattan internal research, July 2026).