It is a sad fact that homelessness is on the rise in Sydney, and although the thought of your company having to sleep on a park bench is laughable (though in reality not at all funny),

the corporate equivalent is having your staff “working from home” for a short period of time.

With the average lease being 3 years for most SME businesses these days, the reality is you will probably need to spend at least one-third of that time looking for your next premises.

If that sounds a lot, then consider this – You will need to have settled on your next home with at least 3 months to spare to ensure that phone lines, internet are all in place, another month or two should you need any walls to be moved, IT ports installed, then add at least 2 months for your lawyers to review and negotiate the lease agreement, and that is leaving you less than 6 months to actually find the dream property, that will accommodate any future growth over the next 3 years.

And here is why that is a pressing issue. With the construction of the Sydney Metro, over 500,000sqm of office space was removed from the Sydney CBD. These were mainly B & C grade buildings, with offices of 200-500sqm contained within. Perfect SME offices. The result in this is that the vacancy rate for such premises, which normally sits around the 4-5% mark, has plummeted below 2%. The upshot is that the perfect office is harder to find than ever, and with more competition to secure it, 6 months may not be long enough for your search.

 

At CoTen, this week, we welcome as a new tenant, a 6 person company who were weeks away from corporate homelessness. CoTen is known throughout Sydney for providing SMEs with 4 – 20 staff short term office leases. We are happy to do this because many of them stay with us for over 5 years. A good example of this is Partnerize, a tenant who joined CoTen over 7 years ago, in our smallest office (2 people), and have now grown to be our largest tenant with over 26 staff members, moving into larger suites as they grew, but keeping the same address.

We are here to help.

If you know anybody who’s lease is expiring in the next 12 months, please forward this blog to them, so that they are aware of the pressing need to take the possibility of corporate homelessness seriously. If you have just received this blog from a concerned friend, please feel free to reach out and contact CoTen on 02 9008 1122 to see if we can help avoid that park bench for your staff.