Acquiring a small office space in the West End of London can be a real pain. Essentially you have two main options, serviced, or leased 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.
Leased Offices in London
Searching for a small conventionally leased 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 a London office 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:
- finding the suitable office space, matching the searcher’s needs
- 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.
For more essential tips and advice, have a look at The Knowledge - and for answers to your questions about London office space, check out our FAQs.
Ian Kitchener
Ian has advised Central London office occupiers for over 20 years - fighting their corner and making sure they get a great office on the best terms. He has a diverse client following, often working with creative companies.
