April 1st 2010. The day the new Rating Valuation List will come into play.

Many London office occupiers will see a large hike in their rates bills, particularly in the West End. Early notice of the new Rateable Values is being sent to rate payers, so plan your budgets well in advance, because even if you appeal the new figure you will still be liable to pay in full until the appeal is settled and this can take a couple of years to achieve.

What should you do to minimise your payments?
Appoint a Rating Surveyor pronto. They can advise you on the new figure and make the appeal for you. Like FindaLondonOffice, our recommended advisor’s fees are based on success, any costs can be paid out of the refund if the appeal succeeds.

Don’t waste time fretting about that notice from the Government, get yourself a specialist adviser as soon as possible.

I have already recieved my new Rateable Value on my Office space. Only small print told me that this doesn’t apply until 1 April 2010. I am amazed at the uplift.

Apparently the new figures apply to all commercial properties in the Country, but West End Offices have been hit by the largest rises.

With such substantial increases on the horizon, finding an experienced Rating Adviser is your best bet. With a success based fee, you have nothing to lose in doing so.

London is internationally renowned for countless things – its landmarks, its pubs, its culture, its music, its excellent public transport system and its fashion. However, one thing that London is most certainly not renowned for is its food. In fact, the city is widely regarded around the globe as having some of the worst food in the world

Luckily for Londoners, the last few decades have seen somewhat of a renaissance in London’s food. This can be attributed to the influx of immigrants with their rich, authentic cuisines, a growing national consciousness about the value of organic produce and increasing public awareness of healthy eating habits. All these factors have resulted in the proliferation of eateries in all shapes and sizes, perfectly catering to any budget, time constraint and location.

In the market for a quick, healthy bite for a hurried work lunch? Your choices are plenty.

Depending on which area you’re in, your options can generally be divided into three. The first is your typical healthy fast food outlet, such as Pret-a-Manger or Café Nero. Within these mini food emporiums are sandwiches of all varieties, wraps, basic sushi bentos, crisps and salads. You`ll also find little sweet treats including fruit, brownies, muffins and yogurts, as well as most of the popular non-alcoholic drinks and fruit juices.

Also within this category are franchise coffee chains, such as Starbucks and Costa, who offer a good range of healthy quick meals and snacks, to add to your giant coffee if you`re so inclined.

An often overlooked option are the food halls of supermarket chains such as Sainsburys, Waitrose, John Lewis and Marks and Spencer’s. The advantage of grabbing your lunch from these types of outlets is the extensive variety. Not to mention that the buying of food is an impersonal transaction, which is ideal when you’re thinking about that overdue report waiting for you on your desk.

Next, we have the hole in the wall sandwich and bagel shop. In recent decades, most of these have graduated from being grimy greasy spoon-esque sausage roll houses to offering a decent range of fresh sandwiches, salads and wraps. No fuss, no muss and generally much more friendly service than the sullen pimple faced employees of places in franchise eateries.

Finally within the speed-eat category, we have the restaurant takeaway option. This may take a little more time and cost a little more, but if you’re looking for something hot, tasty and probably likely to slightly irritate your co-workers, zipping into a Thai or Indian restaurant to grab a curry to eat at your office may be your best bet.

If you have a little more time and money at your disposal, London is endlessly littered with cheapy restaurants with cuisines from all around the world. Chain restaurants such as Pizza Express are always a safe bet for a leisurely sit down lunch. Another option is the quintessentially English pub lunch, with just about every block in central London housing a pub that offers various traditional dishes to be washed down with a well deserved pint. At the pub down the road from your office, you can expect to find a good pie, hearty stew, steak and chips. Many pubs will do a passable curry also and a Sunday roast if you`re unlucky enough to be working on a Sunday.

London’s wealth of cheap eateries, ethnic restaurants and food outlets mean that wherever you`re standing in central London, you`re likely to be less than 50m from an eatery. However, it can be hard to find something that takes your fancy straight away and even more so when you’re pressed for time. Repositories such as events and London are an invaluable navigation tool and your ticket to getting what you want to eat, when you want it.

If your rent is due a review, you would do well to seek an expert!

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good and certainly the steep decline in rental values of central London offices has provided many businesses with some shelter from the economic storm which has been raging through the economy over the last two years.

So with such a fall in rental values, no need then for tenants to concern themselves about their forthcoming rent reviews, it’s upward only and central London office rents are lower than five years ago. Similarly landlords’ might as well accept that there will be no increase and indeed should feel grateful that they have a tenant at all.

Not true!

Yes in some locations office rents will be lower than five years ago but on average they are significantly higher than 2004. Thus there is yet considerable scope for landlords to seek uplifts and for tenants to defend.

A sharp lookout is reviewing lease documentation at least nine months before a critical date be it rent review, lease expiry or break option. The latter can be a sunken reef for landlords and tenants. In my experience better foresight achieves better results.

As every sailor knows, riding out a storm is not simply a case of battening down the hatches and hoping for the best but rather keeping a sharp look out for dangers, changes in conditions and seeking shelter.

FindaLondonOffice are experienced in safely navigating the turbulent waters of rent reviews and spotting both hazards and opportunities.

We welcome you aboard for safe passage.

Ramsay

Virtual Offices vs Conventional

Telecommuting is particularly good for startups and small companies due to financial constraints. However, the growing trend of virtual offices does bring with it a host of problems. Most of which are social.

It has been argued that the social aspects of a conventional office are actually an inhibitor to productivity, however some key considerations are:
Social interaction has a massive impact on motivation.
Interactivity is particularly desirable in creative environments.
A closer knit team can be fostered in a conventional office than one that rarely meets face to face.

To many, the people they work with influence their overall job satisfaction and has a key influence on everything from job satisfaction to retention.

Productivity
Employees can work for longer in a home environment, but is this really a good thing? In a virtual office environment, I believe it is important that any employee that telecommutes should have a real vested interested in performing to the best of their ability and that incentive is part of this. However when does it become too much?

Longer Hours
In the UK we already work longer hours than our European counterparts which is not good for our well being. Even if employees can get more done, they are less likely to be able to approach work with a fresh mentality if they cannot disconnect themselves from their work. This will have a detrimental effect on the quality of their work and their creative abilities.

Managing a Virtual Office
Management can be more difficult due to a lack of supervision, but this can work both ways. By setting target based work and deadlines a positive outcome can be reached with the right kind of employee.

How to Maximise Efficiency
The most important thing is to be very careful from the selection process onwards with virtual office workers. Not everyone is suited for it but it can work well and reduce overheads in certain circumstances.

Know When to Change
As your business grows, stepping up from a virtual office becomes more desirable for a number of reasons. Having to book meeting rooms when you are dealing with clients more regularly can prove very expensive and far less convenient. Having an office forms part of your overall company image and can say a lot about your ethos. You could expect to reduce the following costs

• Having to meet health and safety regulations at multiple locations.
• Information security (cheaper and easier from a central location).
• Meeting rooms

It will also increase the scope of the kinds of employee that would be suit your team. Telecommuters who work well can of course continue to telecommute.

Conclusion
While telecommuting is great for startups and certain smaller companies, having a central office can be very advantageous and striking a balance between office working and telecommuting can make your business more dynamic.

For further information or advice, do contact us.

Look for ways to maximise value in your London office space

Throughout the course of the blog, we have covered many ways that can save you money when searching for office space in London. You will see by the end of this post that it’s not all about minimising your outlay (though this plays a part), it’s also about maximising the value of your decision and thinking ahead when possible.

It was high time to put together some of our most important tips, so here they are:

1. Negotiate

There are a a variety of negotiable costs when dealing with London office space. We have talked before about the current economic climate spelling opportunity for tennants to negotiate. While we’d recommend using experts (ahem!) to do this for you, this article will provide you some key insights into what can be negotiated.

2. Communicate

Due to the sheer volume of process that goes into finding and securing a London office, it’s easy for a breakdown in communication to occur between landlord and tennant, agent and landlord or tennant and agent. While we can attest to good communication being a foremost priority with FindaLondonOffice, it still happens all the time. It is an essential part of negotation and being thorough can save an awful lot of time, which as you know, equates to money.

3. Reconsider Your Actual Office Requirements

Have you considered opting for office space that has already had a fitout? Depending on what you need, you could stand to save a lot of money by finding an office that has already been fitted out to your requirements, or perhaps broadening your criteria. The money saved could also cover alterations that you require.

4. Maximise Use of Your Space

If cramming something into every cubic metre is what you think I mean by this, you couldn’t be further off the mark!

Remember that your number one asset as a business is your people. Ensuring they have a properly designed office environment can dramatically increase productivity. This might influence your decision towards choosing a larger office space, however if it means staff can work more efficiently it will very likely be a worthwhile move. Of course it also means vast savings if you have plans to expand. Thinking office ergonomics through properly can not only improve productivity, it also reduces the likelihood to your staff developing health issues.

5. Think Carefully About Your Location

I have to highlight the fact that for many seeking London office space, their chosen London office location is not based on much more than a personal preference. This is all well and good, but as you can see from our rental guide, the cost per varies substantially. If your premises is not client facing, you have considerably fewer reasons to shell out on premium ground level office space in the most prestigious area you can think of. If you can attract business based on your location, it may in fact be worth doing, in which case doing so could pay for itself many times over.

The Value of Thinking Ahead!

So as you can see, our guide to saving money isn’t necessarily to take the most frugal approach possible, it’s more to do with maximising the value of whatever office space move you intend to make and making the most of what you get.

We would be happy to advise you further should you wish to contact us.

August is one of my favourite months. People come to the office in less formal attire, and holidays are on the horizon.

There’s space for quality time, some lateral thinking and perhaps a spot of networking. In the property world restaurants like Shampers in Kingly St, have seemed fuller than you would expect for August.

The low level of activity in the 2009 Central London office market led my wife to Google “M” for Manchester rather than Mauritius in her quest to find our holiday destination for this year.

Mrs K then suggested a compromise – the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. This seemed hopelessly extravegant after months of negotiating longer rent free periods and observing London office rents tumble from their pre credit crunch heights.

I was reminded however, that fees charged by FindaLondonOffice are linked to savings we successfully negotiate in the first year of a lease, so I chose not to put up too much of a fight…

The problem with summer holidays though is that after a few days sunbathing by the pool, the mind starts to wander back to Old Blighty.

One starts to wonder how the market is doing and whether come Christmas we will be Googling “B” for Bognor or “B” for Barbados…”

London Lunch

Finding time for lunch is certainly not as easy as it once was.

It’s not a result of the credit crunch either. In fact, the time taken for lunch has been reducing for years; a trend that has seen delivery services and high speed food outlets have been springing up for some time.

Gone is the lunch “hour” that is still written into employment contracts.  A large percentage of people just don’t take the full hour and this cultural change is in many ways surprising given the various European directives on working hours which you would expect to make matters go the other way.

The picture is not clear, but it may be the substantial disappearance of what happened in the old days, e.g., your boss or employer giving you a dirty look if you were a bit late in the morning, and the more generally accepted flexible working where people know what work they have to do and roughly how long they should spend doing it. Perhaps they have adjusted their work pattern to suit.

This is largely a matter of interpretation, but we are absolutely sure that rather well dressed people spending 3 hours for lunch in rather good restaurants have worked out this balance to perfection!

As we move through the central business districts in the course of our work, moving from one office building to another, we are a little baffled as to who the people are in suits or similar standing outside drinking pints of beer or whatever at say 3.30 in the afternoon.  Flexible working sounds like fun for some!

Keep on top of the best eateries in London with the FindaLondonOffice Guide to Eating Out.

The restaurant offers an ever changing and wide ranging choice of food of a continental style, with many of these dishes being quite traditional.

The wine list is excellent and extensive, and the atmosphere is that of bustling activity on account of the seemingly endless amount of people who want to eat there.

This restaurant is great value. We are sure that the bill will not leave a sour taste in your mouth!

We at FindaLondonOffice deal with so many different clients in so many different locations that amongst other things, we learn what they have learnt – where to eat.  New to the blog will be a place where we can pass this information on.

Our clients have worked out what is great value as opposed to low cost.  The supply of this information is plentiful but sporadic, hence updates will only appear when a new discovery is made and we feel it is worthy of mention.

Many in Britain have more recently discovered the wonders of Turkey, especially on account of the strength of the euro, as they have not adopted the currency.  The food experience in Turkey particularly good, with the result that eating out at a Turkish restaurant has become increasingly popular in the UK.

We were introduced by a client to a long established Turkish restaurant in Marylebone called Topkapi, based at 25 Marylebone High Street. They provide excellent Turkish cuisine in an authentic Turkish atmosphere.

As to cost, this place is great value, and their Koftas and spicy  chicken are, we think, as good as they get.  Try and see what you think.

Suffice it to say there is an obvious use for a designated room for unwell staff to retire to in order to take a moment, swallow a tablet and have a rest before returning to work.

Less predictable uses included:

• TV room for watching Countdown, and compulsive daytime sporting events such as a  Murray semi final at Wimbledon.
• A place for pregnant women to lie down for 45 minutes in order to recharge their batteries.
• A place for working parents to recouperate for half an hour, having been kept up the previous night by their troubled offspring.
• Other popular uses included lunch time pilates, relaxation courses, head massages, pedicures and lifestyle counciling.

At FindaLondonOffice, we have a small sick bay, which at present is being used to accommodate a colleagues minature Cocker Spaniel! Our colleague could not bear putting Fifie into kennels whilst he is on a family holidays in the South of France.