Updated: January 23, 2019
How exciting that you’re trying to find office space for lease or sale. This means two things. Either you have enough sales that you’ve hired employees and outgrown the spare bedroom, or your Mom is kicking you out the garage (heheheheh).
In all seriousness, this is a very exciting stage of an entrepreneur’s career but it can quickly turn into a stressful one. Depending in the commercial real estate state of the market, either you will have a lot of options, or none at all. So let’s delve into it.
First thing you will jump on your favorite search engine (ours is Google) and type “find office space”. You’ll find hundreds of links, but what you quickly realize is that there are many sites, but none of them have all of the listings on one website. Why is this?
Well, unlike residential real estate, there isn’t an MLS for commercial real estate. In fact, most of the commercial real estate listing websites are independent companies (some publicly traded) whose #1 asset that keeps them in business is the unique content they have on their website. If there was one company that had all the listings they would die.
What Does this Mean for You?
It means heartache. No seriously. To find your dream office space, you will have to check tons of websites for hours on until you find the perfect place for your business.
How to Get Started:
Instead of jumping on Google and wasting hours trying to figure out which websites you can use to find office space for rent or purchase for yourself, we’ll outline and link you to the sites you can use below. But first, you must think hard about what your tolerance for office space is and the stage of your business.
Sharing Office Space with Others:
In order to find cheap office space options to rent, you may consider that your business is okay sharing space with other companies. This is a perfect option for startups or companies growing fast that are unable to sign a long term lease. If this is your case you can try coworking space, executive suites or shared space opportunities. There are a few shared office space and coworking space search engines that you can use. A few popular ones are:
All of the websites above aggregate companies willing to rent part of their office space to other companies and also list coworking space opportunities.
Short Term Space:
If you need short term space, you may want to consider subleasing space (the whole space, not a part of it) from another company or finding a small landlord who will be okay signing a short term lease.
You can find sublease opportunities in most commercial real estate listing search engines, but they are not easy to filter out. This means you have to look at hundreds of individual listings before being able to identify a sublease opportunity for your company. Instead, we would recommend you start at a search engine that specializes in sublease opportunities or an online marketplace where small landlords often post their availabilities. The following sites are good options for this case:
Your Own Space (Be selfish!):
If you need your own private office space suite, then you will want to try the main commercial real estate listing websites. Like we mentioned earlier, none of these websites have 100% of all the listings in one place, so you will want to check all of them to make sure you’re not missing any opportunities for your business.
It’s also good to keep in mind that while some of these websites are free to use, the ones with the most listings will start charging you $100s of dollars to use after a limited number of listings. If you want to avoid this you can check out this post. Another important note is that the websites with most office space listings and best search filters are restricted to commercial real estate agents. A good example is CoStar.
If you need to find your own office space, you can use the following commercial real estate listing websites:
- Digsy
- LoopNet
- Rofo.com
- OfficeSpace.com
- 42Floors.com
- Showcase.com
- Commercialmls.com
- CommercialSearch.com
- PropertyLine
Here’s How Easy it is to Find Office Space Using Digsy
How to Save Time Finding Office Space:
Finding the perfect office space is going to take you some time, A LOT of time and by the end you will feel like you should get a career in commercial real estate. Whatever you do, don’t change your profession! I’m sure you have a kick ass business and believe me, they need you there changing the world, rather than schlepping commercial real estate.
In order to help you save some time here are some tips if you’re searching for space on your own:
- Keep track of every listing you inquire on: You’d be surprised how hard it is to get a hold of office space leasing agents. Many of them are very busy and sometimes they don’t call back at all.
- Call, Leave a Voicemail and Email: Make sure you do all these 3 things. A good idea is also to ask the leasing agent’s receptionist to connect you with the leasing agent’s cell phone line (or ask them to give you the number).
- If you don’t hear within 24 hours, call & email again: Yup. Like we mentioned, commercial real estate listing agents are busy and it will take you several tries.
What if You Don’t Want to Waste Time on Finding Office Space?
Most business owners and entrepreneurs are very busy growing their businesses, which means they have little time to find office space. Old convention would suggest that if at first you don’t succeed, then try again. But running the demands of running a business doesn’t afford you this luxury. That is why if you’re having a hard time it is best to outsource the search for office space to a trusted commercial real estate professional.
You can hire a tenant representation agent to help you find space. Tenant representation agents help business owners find office space while they focus on growing their businesses. If you consider hiring a tenant representation agent, it is extremely important that you check their references, talk to their past customers and meet them in person. The last thing you want is to end up with a lousy commercial real estate agent that won’t perform as expected and waste your time. Hiring an exceptional tenant representation agent is critical to your success finding office space and saving precious time — which is why at Digsy, we put local tenant representation agents (Digsy Experts) through a rigorous testing and vetting process. We do this so that we connect business owners with agents that not only will save them time, but exceed their expectation.
If you need help finding space, you can always try using our free service and we’ll connect you with a local Digsy expert to help you save a ton of time finding the office space of your dreams.
Please leave your comments or questions below.
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August 12, 2017 at 3:44 am
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For more details please visit at http://kesinc.com.