Is Business Center Office Rental Really Expensive?
Full service office rental like you would find in a business center is expensive, but worth it. It only seems expensive if you compare the cost per square foot to that of another space tucked away in some retail development or a sliver of an office building that is small enough to meet your needs if you can find it. That’s of course assuming you’re looking for something on the order of 1 to 3 offices.
We’ll put aside questions of how professional it looks to be located next to retail establishments, sharing parking with shoppers and having clients run the gauntlet of shoppers, kids, strollers and the like to reach your office. Instead we’ll address the cold hard facts of the expense of managing an office.
If you compare what the cost of our fully serviced office rental is compared to what you might find elsewhere, we might be 3 or 4 times more expensive on per square foot basis. But when you consider the amount of space you’ll need and have to pay for, you’ll see it’s quite a different story.
At Meadow Creek Business Center in Issaquah, you pay for:
• Your office
What is included with your office is:
• Lobby
• Break rooms
• Conference rooms
• Restrooms
• Hallways to get to them
• Parking
• Landscaping
• Receptionist
• Phone service
• Internet service
• Cleaning service
• Coffee service
• Print, scan, fax machine
• On-demand admin help
• Postage equipment
• Electricity
• Gas for heating
• Water & Sewer
• Maintenance & Repair
• Common area furniture
• Fire protection
About half of our space is not office rental space, but common areas shared by all. Setup shop on your own and you’ll need to make provisions for that. Not everyone needs a lobby, maybe no one ever visits you, unlikely as that seems. I guess you don’t really need a break room, everyone can eat at their desk and have their own little refrigerators in their office. And make their own coffee in their office, no that’s not good, you can put it in the lobby, if you have one. Oh, and someone is going to have to pay for the coffee and the coffee machine and those little creamers, sugar, stirrers, tea for people that drink tea and so on and so forth. You’ll probably want to use a service, until you find out how much that costs. You’ll just run to the store every once in a while. It all gets so complicated.
Back to space. Let’s assume people do visit you and you do need a lobby. If you have a lobby you’ll kind of need a receptionist. Now wait, there’s a monumental waste of money, you can just put a phone on a table in the lobby with instructions to dial your number. Nothing screams success and class like a lobby phone. Just put one of those little bells that you hit with the palm of your hand on the table. That will do. Don’t forget to go out and pick up a boat load of furniture by the way. Empty rooms can be awkward.
Maybe a little art work too. When you walk down the hall from the lobby to your office or conference room, it might look a little sterile without it. And hey, you’ll be paying as much for that hallway as your office so it might as well look good. Better keep it clean too. Maybe you can have the receptionist you cut out of the budget do it. Don’t even think about, way different L&I rating, the state will hang you by your thumbs.
I keep getting sidetracked, but there’s just so much to think about when you’re taking about office space. You’ll soon get the notion that you’ll save having your own facility until your business is big enough to have a facilities department. That comes sometime after deciding to splurge on a receptionist or admin.
Admin? There’s another thought. Most of us need administrative support. You know, someone to make copies, send faxes, send out the mail, do some filing etc. Problem is, it’s really hard to keep them busy. When they don’t have anything to do it’s like throwing money away. That’s why getting your admin support at a business center is so handy. You pay for the support you need and use. You’re probably on to this one already, you’ll need all of that office equipment for the admin to use.
But you’re not going to let me trick you are you. You’ve got your little printer in your office and that will work just fine. You don’t need some fancy $800 a month copier sitting in the break room or hallway or lobby you’re paying a king’s ransom for. Well except for those big print jobs you do. You’d lose your mind listening to that thing inside the printer go back and forth for 2 hours. But you can just send your print jobs to one of those big box office stores and they’ll take care of it. You can just shoot over there and pick it up, that’s convenient.
Well, we could go on and on so let me wrap this up. If you’re running a small business, money is no object, you have the patience of Job and your own time isn’t worth jack, then setting up your own office makes perfect sense.
If you have your office rental at Meadow Creek Business Center, there’s no long term commitment, no tenant improvements to pay for, you won’t need to bring in and manage your own phone and internet service, you won’t need to rent an expensive copier or postage machine, pay for a coffee service or invest your own valuable time managing all of that overhead. When you figure in all of that expense, our space is easily half the cost of that cheap space you saw down the street.
Our offices are conveniently located just off of I-90 and close to Issaquah, Sammamish, Snoqualmie, North Bend and the entire I-90 corridor.
Comments