Location, Location Location!

Choosing the right location for your London office space can be a daunting prospect, particularly if your knowledge of the city is skin deep. Sometimes your initial instincts are spot on, but often a more in depth knowledge of what’s available elsewhere will lead to a change of heart.

Using a London Office agent can help you make better, more informed choices about where to locate – or relocate – your office space.

FindaLondonOffice recently found and secured new office space for Campus Living Villages, an Australian company who provide campus student accommodation in the UK, as well as Australia, New Zealand and the USA, and specialise in ensuring that students have better living conditions. They have existing offices in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. However as many of their clients come from abroad, a London office has become vital. Their new offices are within 5 minutes walk of London Bridge station.

However their first instincts were for offices in Covent Garden – the more fashionable and high profile option.

Of course, with profile and fashion, cost often follows. And offices in Covent Garden are usually expensive! Having taken the brief, FindaLondonOffice began an extensive office search on behalf of Campus Living Villages, including the Covent Garden area. Because of our insider knowledge, we have been able to find them a fantastic 2,000 ft² office in Bermondsey Street, offering unusually high specification offices for this area. These offices – a clever blend between a 19th century warehouse and brand new space – are as good as any they saw in other areas, and of course offices in Waterloo and Southwark have lower rent than their equivalent in Covent Garden and the West End.

Without our help and expertise, Campus Living Villages would have been focussing exclusively on Covent Garden, and wouldn’t have found these great value premises south of the river. So it pays to have an expert on board to handle your office search. And the advantages don’t just stop there:

• Many of their staff live in Tunbridge Wells, near their existing offices. Commuter trains run directly from Tunbridge Wells to London Bridge, so the new location is very convenient.
• These offices were very much in demand. As someone else was interested, FindaLondonOffice had to fight very hard indeed to secure these premises.
• We know the letting agent very well, and this made a big difference to securing these office for Campus Living Villages.

So when it comes to finding the right office space, in the right location, and at the right price, it pays to employ an expert with insider knowledge, experience and connections.

Acquiring a small office space in the West End of London can be a real pain…..

Essentially you have two main options, serviced, or conventional office space:

Serviced Offices in London

If you search for an London office on Google, you are likely to end up deluged with a huge response from serviced office providers and lots of brokers, who will often be giving you the same information. It can get confusing and irritating.

A great way of simplifying a serviced office search would be to use one really good office broker, who has full market information. In one fell swoop they are geared to send you information on everything on the market that meets your brief in terms of location, quality and pricing.

The broker will often provide a great service and will be paid by the serviced office provider.

You can get through to our associated broker on this site and we would be interested to hear whether your search is hugely simplified. I suspect it will be. Simply search for serviced office space here.

Conventional Offices in London

Searching for a small conventional office suite, to accommodate say 1 – 5 people can be a real challenge. Because there are so many landlords in the market, you can’t hope to get a good idea of availability and pricing, without the help of an acquisition agent.

Conventional office leases are much more complex than serviced office leases. The top end office acquisition agent can provide a very valuable service in two ways:

1. finding the suitable office space, matching the searcher’s needs
2. helping the searcher (his / her client) negotiate the best commercial terms of the deal, including:
   • Rent (obviously!)
   • but not forgetting more esoteric areas such as lease length, repairing liabilities, letting incentives, future re-letting clauses etc.

The acquisition agent will of course charge the searcher a success related fee for this work, but true value will pass from the best agents.

The trouble, however, is that acquisition agents are not usually “turned on” to acquire small office suites, as they are far more focused on larger, more lucrative work.

To help fill this vacuum, we refer companies to a hand-picked small group of agents, who are focused on this part of the office market in London.

One of the best operators we know – Lloyd – has been working in the market for a number of years and has just opened his own company. Lloyd is very focused: showing market availability, conducting inspections, helping negotiate the deal for the office you choose and – in short – has been getting some great results.

We’d be interested to hear about your office search experiences, and also if you’d be interested in using Lloyd’s services. Please feel free to comment below.

We’ve been working very hard over the past few months to completely revamp FindaLondonOffice. If we’ve done our job properly, you’ll find that the new website is a lot more user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Our London office directory – for both conventional and serviced office space – is now updated on a daily basis, so you’ll have access to widest range of available offices in London. It’s very simple to use:

1. Go to our home page, and choose the area you want to search, by clicking on the map of Central London.
   Not yet sure where you want you new London office to be located? Use our handy guide to choosing a London office location. We also have guides to all the major London areas – e.g. Soho, the City, Mayfair, Bloomsbury, St James’s, Covent Garden.
2. You’ll be presented with a list of every available location in your chosen area. Here’s the clever bit. On the right hand side of the page, you’ll be able to narrow your search by office type: you can choose to view only serviced office space.
   Not sure whether you need serviced office space or a conventional lease? We have a handy guide running through the pros and cons of renting serviced or conventional office space?
3. You can also choose to narrow your search by office size – e.g. 2001-3000 ft2
   Not sure how much space you need? Then use our fabulous office space calculator. Simply add the rooms or space you need, and the calculator will tell you how much total office space you require. Then select a London area, and it will tell you how much that will cost you per year, and display a list of available offices that match your requirements.
Try our London office space calculator now!
4. So now you’re looking at a list of offices that match your your requirements. You can “save” any offices that you are interested in, or go to the detail page to find out more. Here you’ll find a more in depth description of the available office, a Google Map, as well as information on nearest tube stations, current average office costs for this London area, and links to general information about the location.
 If you’ve selected a ‘Hot Property’, you’ll see extended details, including more photos, and – for some offices – floor plans.

Of course, even with the fantastic tools available on this website, renting office space in London is a complex task, and – if you’ve never done it before – much like trying to navigate a minefield without a map! Finding a range of possible offices is just the first baby step in the journey to moving into your ideal London office.

Fortunately we also have an extensive London office knowledge base, that will tell you everything you need to know, but were too afraid to ask! All the do’s and don’t, essential checklists, as well as the boring legal stuff.

Obviously, for a lot of people this is still a daunting prospect, and if it’s really not for you, we recommend handing the whole task over to our team of experienced  professionals. Heading this team, Michael Fraser and Ian Kitchener have  – between them – over 50 years of experience in commercial London property! They can navigate that minefield for you, giving you peace of mind and saving you time and money into the bargain.

Give them a call on 08700 555760, or register here.

Michael and Ian will be blogging here on a regular basis, so you can see for yourself, the level of their expertise.

In the meantime we will be continuing to improve this website, adding new features and refining existing ones. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment below.

Look for ways to maximise value in your London office space

Throughout the course of the blog, we have covered many ways that can save you money when searching for office space in London. You will see by the end of this post that it’s not all about minimising your outlay (though this plays a part), it’s also about maximising the value of your decision and thinking ahead when possible.

It was high time to put together some of our most important tips, so here they are:

1. Negotiate

There are a a variety of negotiable costs when dealing with London office space. We have talked before about the current economic climate spelling opportunity for tennants to negotiate. While we’d recommend using experts (ahem!) to do this for you, this article will provide you some key insights into what can be negotiated.

2. Communicate

Due to the sheer volume of process that goes into finding and securing a London office, it’s easy for a breakdown in communication to occur between landlord and tennant, agent and landlord or tennant and agent. While we can attest to good communication being a foremost priority with FindaLondonOffice, it still happens all the time. It is an essential part of negotation and being thorough can save an awful lot of time, which as you know, equates to money.

3. Reconsider Your Actual Office Requirements

Have you considered opting for office space that has already had a fitout? Depending on what you need, you could stand to save a lot of money by finding an office that has already been fitted out to your requirements, or perhaps broadening your criteria. The money saved could also cover alterations that you require.

4. Maximise Use of Your Space

If cramming something into every cubic metre is what you think I mean by this, you couldn’t be further off the mark!

Remember that your number one asset as a business is your people. Ensuring they have a properly designed office environment can dramatically increase productivity. This might influence your decision towards choosing a larger office space, however if it means staff can work more efficiently it will very likely be a worthwhile move. Of course it also means vast savings if you have plans to expand. Thinking office ergonomics through properly can not only improve productivity, it also reduces the likelihood to your staff developing health issues.

5. Think Carefully About Your Location

I have to highlight the fact that for many seeking London office space, their chosen London office location is not based on much more than a personal preference. This is all well and good, but as you can see from our rental guide, the cost per varies substantially. If your premises is not client facing, you have considerably fewer reasons to shell out on premium ground level office space in the most prestigious area you can think of. If you can attract business based on your location, it may in fact be worth doing, in which case doing so could pay for itself many times over.

The Value of Thinking Ahead!

So as you can see, our guide to saving money isn’t necessarily to take the most frugal approach possible, it’s more to do with maximising the value of whatever office space move you intend to make and making the most of what you get.

We would be happy to advise you further should you wish to contact us.

London office requirements are changing as time goes by

Over the years we have helped numerous tenants find their perfect London office space and it has been interesting to note how some of their requirements have changed.

Years ago tenants wanted their own “front door” and self contained buildings over numerous floors let at a premium. Over the last couple of decades, there has been a huge shift of tenants needing to operate over large open plan floors, in order to maximise business efficiency.

In the heady days when London was leading the charge of the financial markets, we helped an array of tenants find  large impressive manned receptions leading to high level oppulent office space featuring views over landmark green spaces in prime Mayfair and St James’s. Today’s post credit crunch tenants often seek lower profile space as they dont want to be seen as proflegate.

Car parking used to be very desirable and even today one or 2 spaces can help let an office. Since the introduction of Ken’s Congestion Charge, however, driving in Central London has become much more expensive and parking in town is much less in demand. We are arranging a lease at the moment where the tenant is asking the landord to transform car parking into cycle racking. The deal is about to sign,  most of the pre lease discussions have concerned presentation of basement shower rooms for cyclists!

Whenever interest rates go down, there is increased demand to buy a freehold rather than rent an office and have to put up with landlords, managing agents, rent reviews and service charges. Having said this, commercial mortgages are difficult to obtain right now. There is also an intrinsic problem with smaller freeholds in that they tend to offer “lighthouse” space over 5 or 6 floors.

A new requirement we have recently detected, is for outside space. It has always been nice to have a balcony or a roof terrace, but seldom high up on the corporate search list. We suspct this new “must have” is to satisfy the boss, who can’t stop smoking!

Over the years, the requirement that remains constant is for a well known reasonably prestigious address that is close to great transport. Great transport is key because the main premise of working in Central London is the potential to attract talented staff from north south, east and west.

Rent Reviews Require an Expert

Rent reviews and lease renewals are infrequent occurrences but hold considerable importance for both landlords seeking to maximise their income and tenants seeking to lower their overheads.

As a tenant, professional representation is the only way to assure this objective is met. Although a range of firms offer rent review services, the bottom line is that to secure the edge required to win better terms, a specialist is an absolute requirement. Experience in the field is key, as is a high level of expertise in Landlord and Tenant law.

An expert also requires a strong understanding of office rental values, of course having access to a transaction database is something we consider to be fundamentally critical during the rent rent review process.

Disputes
Disputes are often referred to arbitration and experience in the conduct of these proceedings is paramount.
As London office market experts, we have access to leading rent review experts that meet these demanding requirements. In addition, we ensure that our experts are well versed in rent review and lease renewals in London, as having area specific knowledge is greatly beneficial, and of course, the London office market is where the stakes are generally higher for both landlord and tenant.

Introducing our Expert
Ramsay Mason is a Fellow of The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and is our senior professional consultant, specialising in landlord & tenant advice including rent reviews, lease renewals and arbitration upon a range of property including offices, shops and industrial premises.

In recent years he has dealt with a number of important rent reviews in the central London area. He is one of the leading experts upon the valuation and appraisal of commercial property including complex development appraisal and property investment advice.

Ramsay Mason has kindly agreed to guest post on our blog so keep an eye out for his posts to come in the near future.

We have recently received feedback that suggested it would be good to talk about how we operate in the blog. So here are our main objectives:

Offering comprehensive information

One of our foremost aims is to provide plenty of useful information on this site.

Working for you

When it comes to finding office space in London, we can take the whole job away and do it for you if you want us to.

Listening

We listen carefully to what it is you want – and also what you don’t want.

Providing you options

We can then use our database to check what’s out there and to check current availability. We have the market position to source options which have not yet come on to the market. We can compile a list of just about everything that’s available.

Efficiency

Based on what we’ve learnt from you, we can filter out the poor options – this can save so much of your time by not inspecting unsuitable office space. We arrange for you to see potentially suitable offices, at a time to suit you, and we come with you. We provide inspection checklists and will discuss and debate the various merits or otherwise with you, to try to help you compile a shortlist. We then help you hone it down to the preferred option, and hopefully will identify a back up choice with you.

Negotiation

We pride ourselves on our ability to negotiate and there are lots of different subjects apart from rent. Please see our post on negotiation.

It might seem like a good idea to search for your own office space, but as I mentioned in the post regarding frequently asked questions, the process takes time. Although some people do succeed, there are many details to consider. Many companies seek advice as trying to do it can take an inordinate amount of time.

Why is it time consuming?

1. To get details of everything that’s available around Central London you would need to contact around 500 firms. That’s a lot of phone calls to make!
2. After you identify the offices that fit our requirements, how do you value them?
3. Can you identify the lease terms you need to negotiate? Having a good  understanding of current market conditions is key to securing the best deal.

At FindaLondonOffice, we have inside market knowledge and contacts, as well as access to databases that allow us to find London office spaces that have not yet hit the main market.

Without turning this into a sales pitch, I would like to point you towards the nature of comments we receive from our clients:

Their great strength from the standpoint of another professional is their diligence in <strong>getting the detail right</strong> – not something that I always come across in their competitors. They follow through on the process and I know when they are involved that the client will have all the back up needed.

Colin Cannings, Senior Partner, Cannings Connolly – Solicitors

This industry requires a meticulous work ethic.