What's included in a serviced office?
The genuine appeal of serviced space is one invoice instead of eleven. Here is what that invoice usually covers, and the handful of things it does not.
Included
In the monthly fee, almost everywhere
- The workspace itself, furnished with desks and chairs
- Business rates on your room
- Service charge and building insurance
- Heating, cooling, lighting and electricity during business hours
- Daily cleaning of your office and the shared areas
- Shared kitchens, tea, coffee and usually filtered water
- Business-grade broadband and Wi-Fi
- Staffed reception and visitor handling during business hours
- Post handling and a business address
- A monthly meeting room credit
- Breakout space, phone booths and shared printing to a fair-use limit
- Maintenance, security and building access control
Not included
Charged separately, nearly everywhere
- Meeting room hours above your credit
- Car parking
- Dedicated internet lines, static IPs and private VLANs
- Printing beyond fair use
- Out-of-hours heating and cooling in some buildings
- Your own contents insurance and IT equipment
- Telephone handsets and numbers, if you still use them
- Storage, lockers and additional cabinets
Comparison
What the same costs would look like on a conventional lease
On a lease you would sign for the rent, then separately budget business rates, a service charge, buildings insurance, utilities, a cleaning contract, a broadband contract, a fit-out, furniture, reception cover, maintenance and, at the end, dilapidations. Each is a supplier, a contract and an administrative task.
That is the honest case for serviced space at small scale: not that it is cheaper per square foot — it usually is not — but that the per-square-foot comparison ignores the ten other contracts and the person managing them. Somewhere around twenty to thirty people, the arithmetic starts to favour a managed office or a lease, which is exactly when we tell clients to look at both.
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Important: where this page uses the words “rent”, “rental”, “lease” or “let” to describe workspace, those terms are used for descriptive and search purposes only. The agreement offered by flexible workspace operators is a licence to occupy, not a lease or tenancy, and it does not confer security of tenure under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954. Prices shown are indicative estimates, not quotes or offers.