In cities today there are three options for businesses looking to start up in premises or move to new ones: buy; rent a building/floor of a building; or rent a serviced office. For obvious reasons, the first option is impractical, so this leaves us with the traditional lease and the serviced office. 

Finding the perfect office in Central London can be a difficult task for the majority of occupiers. There are so many boxes to be ticked including location, size, layout, style, amenities; the list could go on and on! Therefore finding an office that ticks every box can be a thankful task and when an office is selected that does it often seems to be the one creeping outside of the budget. 

Birmingham City Council and Network Rail have begun plans on the fourth phase of their Snowhill office scheme. At present, they are working on plans to develop the UK’s largest office block outside London’s Canary Wharf. The development is well under way, with the already-completed first and second phases comprising two buildings totalling 850,000 square feet of office space, and a third phase where work has already started on site and which consists of a further 250,000 square feet of additional office space.

Here at Morgan Pryce we have the pleasure of working with various start-up companies to help them find their first office space, whether they are looking for offices in the City, or offices in the West End. When acquiring office space we work very closely with the client, almost on a day-to-day basis, and we spend a lot of time understanding how their business works as well as how it has grown and expects to grow.

Rekoo, the frontrunner in China’s mobile games market, with 200 million users, has announced that it will be setting up business in London, more specifically, in Tech City. The company, and developer of the game/Android app ‘Find Something’, will be the first Chinese company to move there and is hoping to market its games to European consumers, meaning that a European base is required. 

With a planned Chinese financial district in parts of London’s abandoned docklands, and the recent news that Chinese banks have received permission to open branches here, the relationship between the UK and China appears to be in good shape. 

The service that earlier Conservative governments refused to privatise, with Margaret Thatcher famously vowing not to privatise the Queen’s head, is now in the ownership of shareholders. Royal Mail, one of the most British of institutions, is the property of private investors for the first time in its 500-year history. 

Next year looks to be a positive one if research proves correct. As the global market takes stock of the current opportunities for investment, improving worldwide economies mean that the sums available for investment look to be 6% up from early 2013, according to DTZ.

In the modern world, the internet is the most obvious place to start searching for a new office. However, it’s not always that simple; if you are looking for an office space in Central London, the internet can be very deceiving. It can feel as though there is too much information and too much choice, or not enough information and not enough choice. It is possible to spend hours and hours trawling through Google pages with no luck.

As we enter the final quarter of 2013, we can start to look back at the year and compare it with 2012. In terms of property market figures, the outlook for 2014 looks positive, if the differences recorded between this year and last are to continue.