In case you do decide to look for an office on your own, then let me give you some tips that will save your nerves, time, money, and sometimes business.
Budget for office rent and renovation
The first thing to start with is to decide on a budget. In doing so, we recommend budgeting for the following types of expenses:
- Rent.
- Security deposit (equal to 1 to 6 months rent)
- Repairs.
- Furniture.
- Equipment
- Utilities
There may be additional charges for Class A and B offices:
- Maintenance costs for common parts of the office building.
- Parking.
- Security.
- Service charge.
- Insurance.
The term by which the office is planned to be rented.
Small offices of 200 – 1000 sq.m. can be found without any problems. There are quite a few of them on the market. Problems can arise with small offices, which may simply not be in the location that you have chosen to rent an office. Finding offices with a big area, from 5000 sq.m. may be more difficult, and suitable office space for big offices you have to wait sometimes for years. So we had to look for a suitable office for a large foreign company for almost 3 years, because the requirements for the office and the location were very strict.
So as soon as you start thinking about expanding, you need to immediately think about how to rent an office and look at what is on the market to find the right option at the time when the office will be needed. This will save you time and money. A lot of money, since you won’t have to make a suboptimal decision.
Office space for rent
Determine what kind of office you need: a workhorse or a showcase. You need to determine the list of characteristics that the future office must meet. Among them:
- Area. If you plan to expand in the near future, bookmark the square footage with an eye toward hiring additional staff. As an alternative, which will help to save money, consider offices with a lot of empty space or in the near future (1-3 years) may be the departure of one of the current tenants. Such an approach will allow to save money and not to rent unnecessary space.
- The condition of the premises. With repair or without it. Accordingly, from this directly depend on the cost of repairs and the timing of the move. Maybe where it will only be necessary to update the carpet and paint the walls, and somewhere to do almost a complete overhaul.
- Office space. The office should be comfortable and optimal for the tasks that it will perform. Decide right away you need an office system or open space. If the latter, then calculate how many offices you need, how many meeting rooms, rooms for printers, dressing rooms, warehouses, locker rooms, server rooms, etc. If you’re looking at a ready-made option, chances are that it will take significant resources to remodel the office to make all the fantasies come true. So, if there is a definite quandary in resources, try to fit in with the office landscape you already have.
- Parking. Nowadays it is difficult to imagine a decent office or business center without parking. But it is desirable to look not only on provision of the BC with parking spaces, but also on availability of parkings in the nearest district, since not all employees who come to work by cars will have the right and opportunity to leave their iron horse on the parking of the office center.
- Permit regime. In normal offices it is, but there are cases when you can get into the room only during working hours and on weekdays. For some people this is not a problem at all, and the owner saves significant resources on security.
Feedback on the office center and landlord
We highly recommend reading reviews on the Internet or talking to those tenants who already rent or have rented space in the business center you like. In particular we recommend finding out how the building and premises are maintained, how the relationship between the landlord and the tenants is, and how the landlord sticks to his contractual obligations. Believe me, you can learn a lot of interesting things that will change your intentions dramatically.