Advantages & Disadvantages of Using Serviced Offices

Serviced Offices offer numerous advantages, including:

Prestigious Address & Location

Generally boasting prime business locations in city centres with stylishly designed offices close to major transportation hubs, serviced offices allow your business card to resonate with impressive details, enhancing your professional reputation. It also makes the prospect of taking your future employees, suppliers or even the dreaded bank manager for a tour a whole lot easier. At Corporate Serviced Offices, your address is in Raffles Place – readily recognized as being the core of Singapore’s Central Business District – and definitely conveys a good impression on visitors.

Customer Service Team Included

A serviced office has a body of staff employed to provide you with the basic office services to keep your workspace running, such as secretarial support, a reception team, a post room team, IT support, building maintenance and cleaning. Not only do you gain significant savings from NOT having to hire such staff, but valuable management time savings from NOT needing to handle associated staff recruitment and retention issues. Depart for trips to grow your business, knowing that your office is in good hands.

Jump In Running & Focus On Your Business Growth

A serviced space comes ready-made with such things as Internet connection points, wiring, utilities and even a kitchen area for staff to relax in during coffee breaks. Serviced office spaces also include other facilities such as on-site security and cleaning, in-house IT and communications departments and general management facilities. Instead of having to organise all of these separately, choosing a serviced office space means that all of the features offered by the serviced office operator are included in the monthly rent. All your time and money can be channelled to things like building the business and using your creativity to make more business connections. At Corporate Serviced Offices, we can provide you with a ready-to-use office in as little as 1 hour - make speed to market your competitive advantage today!

Simple User Friendly Contracts

Rather than dealing with complex and intricate lease documents, often involving legal assistance and lawyer fees, a typical service office agreement is written in a plain English format. It is designed to be ‘user friendly’ and avoid unnecessary terms and clauses typically found in a commercial office lease. What’s more, serviced office licences do not attract stamp duties – substantial savings for most businesses.

Tenurial Flexibility

Can you confidently predict what your business priorities will be in 3-5 years time? What your headcount will be? But 3-5 years is the average length of time businesses are required to commit to with conventional office space. In direct contrast to typical office lease structures over multiple years, serviced offices are available for as short as one month to as long as one year, and renewable thereafter. Corporate Serviced Offices even allows leases to be structured over weeks or even days. This is so popular that companies set up temporary bases in our serviced offices whilst looking at a more leisurely pace for their final business address, tapping on the advantage of allowing uninterrupted business continuity, and ensuring they do not lose their place in the market.

Growth Flexibility

Many start-ups and rapidly growing businesses require the potential for ‘overnight’ expansion without relocating offices. Even large MNCs occasionally need expandable space to house temporary staff during boom times. Corporate Serviced Offices provides the flexibility for tenants to upsize, downsize or even vacate the premises to fit their latest business requirements with just one month’s notice.

Payment Flexibility

Conventional tenants are normally required to pay rent quarterly in advance whereas serviced offices invoice clients on a monthly basis, freeing up cash flow. What’s more, many services are already included in your package, including insurance, water, electricity, lighting, internet, etc. Where additional services and personnel are required, you only need to “pay as you use” - pay for when and what is used, rather than supporting the ongoing permanent cost of these items, saving you unnecessary fixed costs.

State-Of-The-Art Equipment Available

Serviced offices provide shared technological infrastructure including intelligent facilities management systems, shared internet, telecoms infrastructure, video conferencing equipment, TVs, photocopiers, digital gear and even coffee machines for tenants’ use. Most of the equipment is of better quality and efficiency than what you would normally be able to purchase, providing access to equipment which may otherwise be unaffordable. Frequent upgrades and additions also mean continuous access to the latest state-of-the-art technologies.

Networking Opportunities

"It's not what you know but who you know". Serviced offices give you the chance to network and cross sell with a variety of other businesses residing within the same building. Gone are the days when you would only find start ups or small businesses residing in serviced space. Today you are just as likely to find divisions of national and global MNCs in the office next door. Where else can you get the chance to mingle and discuss different ideas with a wide variety of professionals from different industries every single day, without even having to leave your office!

Ease of Administration

Serviced offices provide a single consolidated invoice monthly, which includes rent, business support services, building maintenance, electricity and more. No hidden extras or nasty surprises. Consolidated billing also saves accounting time and effort, and therefore your money.

Efficiency

Infrequently used space, such as the pantry, conference and meeting rooms, are supplied and payable on a "pay-per-use" basis so that meeting room you need for an average of 5 hours per week is not costing you rent, rates, service charges, heating etc for all of the rest of the time when it is empty. Corporate Serviced Offices also throws in complimentary meeting room usage hours for tenants so you save even more.

Substantial Cost Savings

Research by the UK Chartered Institute of Purchasing shows that compared to conventional office space, serviced offices can provide substantial cost savings for office users. By doing away with initial capital outlays and hidden charges inherent in conventional leases, savings of as much as 78% have been achieved for companies as large as 60 persons and lease lengths of up to 36 months. And even when you vacate the premises, there are no dilapidation and reinstatement liabilities to worry about. This can be of particular benefit to start-up companies by giving them a defined cost each month to budget to. Rather than trying to add up a series of random costs (including the rent and any business rates), a single figure covers all the eventualities and utility charges, allowing a business to live within their means, without any loss of provisional services. It also makes bookkeeping and accounting much easier.

Disadvantages

Using serviced offices however does have minor disadvantages. For example:

You may not be able to extend your personal brand and corporate style to your office space.
There is less visibility for your business as it is unlikely to appear on the building’s main lobby directory (though most serviced offices offer directory listings on their premises).
Shared facilities may not be available when you need them.
Rental costs may be more expensive over the long-term for larger companies with >30 staff if you don’t need to make frequent office changes.

With serviced offices, you only pay for the space you need and the services you use. Unlike conventional leases with their inherent hidden taxes and costs, all fixed costs of your serviced office are covered in a monthly payment to the business centre management.

Talk to us for more information.