NY Commercial Real Estate - "Rentable Square Feet" vs. "Usable Square Feet"
Written by Jay Harper on June 20th, 2007Advertising of commercial real estate in Manhattan is pretty aweful. It’s so bad you really have no clue what you’re going to see - the size of what you see is often as much as 40% smaller than what was advertised. The system is broken and it wastes everyone’s time.
Slicksurface is growing to the point where we’re needing to find office space. It’s a really frustrating experience. The factors, are 1) space, 2) location, and 3) price. No matter what we look at we’re giving up something…
But the really frustrating part is that none of the real estate agents bother to measure the spaces they advertise. It’s common to only have 60-70% of the space that’s advertised. I’ve seen two spaces that were advertised at 1,000 square feet. When I pulled out my laser/sonic measuring device the first place (in East Harlem) was 999 square feet, the second was about 600 square feet (weird shape - still not quite sure how big it was exactly).
So now I ask the agents what the actual, usable space is, but I’m finding no one can tell me the real dimensions… They have a listing and haven’t even bothered to measure it - so it’s impossible to compare advertisements. You have to show up and measure it yourself, which is a complete waste of our time and the agents’ time.
So now we have to figure out whether we want a small space with no view in midtown west, or a larger space in a place like Gowanus (Brooklyn) or East Harlem where the space and view will be nicer/larger, but the location isn’t as good…