Office space - do you buy or rent?
 

A business question - do you buy or rent your office space?

Rent. Office space is cheap now, at least around here.

RENT! Office space is dirt cheap and has been for a couple of years now.

Just one thing: Don't pay for your own upgrades to the office such as new walls, demolition of old walls or other configuration changes. We did that in the past and it was an expensive lesson for us. Instead, demand that your landlord do it even if it means paying more rent.

I rent office space one cup of coffee at a time :winkwink:

I typically work from home, but when I need to get out I just go grab coffee, or sometimes work at the park in the summer.

Top GFY Biz tip!

Rent OR Buy... Base office space requirements solely around the amount of toilets available.

Rent unless you are already familiar with real estate and want to expand to that biz...

renting is best

We bought our office. It's part of our home. LOL

When we had the studio and office we rented on a long lease.

Buy it. Best movie ever ;)

I own mine:2 cents:

Good tip, but not all landlords would do something like this for you, even if you pay more - at least in my renting experience (some landlords wouldn't fix a broken window). So yeah if you make upgrades / changes and then you move you lose your money and time investment. That's one of the reasons I consider buying, right now prices are low.

:) Can you give a ratio: number of staff / number of toilets = ?

What I'm thinking is that 11 years of renting equals the amount for building (even buying) your own small office. Then on the 12th year you have free office space and an asset and you don't deal with the landlord anymore :).

Do you shoot there? I mean do you have a studio somewhere else?

buy it...
it your business fails you can always rent it :)

Thats true - it depends on the landlord.... my point was though to make a deal with him to do the mods, and to seriously consider everything before doing the mods yourself.

We dropped $50,000 worth of mods on our old office which was at the time, 6000 square feet of office space. We cut through brick walls, built new ones, repainted the ceiling, extended the air conditioning, etc. I was happy at the time but the building itself was in bad shape (gaps between walls and windows, and an air conditioner which flooded a studio, etc). We gave up the space 3 years later so right now, some other company is enjoying that $50k of mods.

To make matters worse, the company hired to do the mods wanted cash, and they in turn screwed around when it came to taxes, etc. In the end the $50k was NOT tax deductible. It just became a big mess that lasted years.

Rent ... Office space is far too cheap and plentiful to lock in these days. :thumbsup

The current score is 6 for RENT and 4 for BUY