A few months ago, Ruth Colp-Haber, who runs Wharton Properties, a commercial brokerage, fielded a call from a client for whom she’d found a cheap office sublet a few years earlier. The space, on 46th and Sixth, had rented for $28 per square foot in 2023, but the sublease was up and the client wanted to sign a long-term one. “They said, ‘I guess the rent will remain about the same?’” Colp-Haber had to deliver some bad news: Rents in that particular building had tripled. The clients ended up moving to a lower-caliber building at 41st and Lexington, where they pay a little more than double their last rent. “And that’s still a good deal,” says Colp-Haber. “Rents have gone up dramatically.”
The Manhattan office market, which was on the verge of collapse just a few years ago, is doing staggeringly well right now: 2026 is on pace to be the single strongest year in terms of leasing activity since 2000, according to Colliers, with nearly 30 million square feet of office space leased since January (leasing averaged 34 million square feet annually before the pandemic). Availability rates in a few corridors — Park Avenue, the World Trade Center — are under 10 percent, rents in some buildings have gone up 20 percent since the winter, and brokers are even starting to see bidding wars over prime office spaces. A few buildings are reportedly asking as much as $250 per square foot. “It’s red hot,” says Kirill Azovtsev, a vice-chairman at Savills.
