Five tips for choosing the best office space for your business in Romania

The more offers for office space you receive, the harder it gets to make a decision. You tend to look at how much it costs and how many sqm you are being offered. But you should be more thorough than this and try to organize the flow of information so you can compare apples with apples. There are five simple things you can do by yourself or while checking if the consultancy firm you have hired is giving you the important details. A guest post by Mirela Raicu, partner with Esop Given the detailed technical specifications, an informed decision on the best headquarters for your firm takes more time and becomes difficult to reach. But there are ways to cut to the chase and find the best solution. As much as possible, evaluate properties based on complete and comparable sets of data. And we mean the relevant information, not the details. For example, for some properties you might get info on the usable area of an office, which is the usable area for the work desks, including kitchen, server area and bathroom. For others, you get info on the leasable area, which includes, apart from the usable area, the common areas. This is actually the area you will pay rent for. We know, sometimes it is difficult to get the same type of data for each building, because each owner understands to promote their property in a certain manner. If you're dealing with a consultancy firm, structuring comparable sets of information is a must. The trouble is when you are working with several consultancy firms, which will give you data structured differently and you will have to put them together and compare, or ask for additional information. Find out what is the common space quota for each office space. This is the space such as halls, stairs, etc, you share with the other tenants in the building. You will notice this can significantly influence or even entirely change the hierarchy of the office spaces you have ranked only based on rent per sqm. For example, an office space with a rent of EUR 10.5 per sqm, which seems the first option based on price, but which has a common space quota of 16 percent, is less advantageous compared to another one where the rent is EUR 11/sqm/month but with a common space quota of only 5 percent. Common space quotas vary between 8 and 13 percent for large buildings, of over 3,000 to 3,500 sqm, and between 12 and 17 percent for smaller buildings – under 3,000 sqm. Analyze the main contract terms and see how flexible they are. The contract period asked by the owner and the possibility of expanding it is one thing to look at. Another is how owners calculate maintenance costs – open book or fixed costs, and in this case, what is the value of the costs? The down payment and the guarantees are another important issue to take into account. You will find out that some buildings, usually the class A ones come with slightly more inflexible terms, because they are financed through bank loans, and it is important to know about it at the beginning of discussions. But even so, after these last 12 months of the crisis, some issues have become more flexible.