Surge in small business demand for serviced office space

Amidst all the negative stories in the news charting the “worst recession for over 100 years”, “since World War II”, or “since records began” – delete headline as appropriate – the UK’s small businesses are expected to be worst hit. And yet many are pulling through with the sort of sheer determination and grit that is sadly lacking in many a large corporation.

John Wright, national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, hit the nail on the head when he said that “Small firms are at the heart of the economy” – and there are certainly plenty of figures to back this up.

Surge in demand for small office space

Recent statistics by office space consultants officebroker.com show that over the first two quarters of 2009, a massive 77% of all UK enquiries were from businesses seeking office space of five desks or under.

Furthermore, their figures show that the most popular request was from businesses seeking two desks. Enquiries about single desks followed closely behind. This shows that there are a considerable amount of self-employed individuals out there with one employee – or working alone – who are actively seeking office space, even in these turbulent times.

Take a look at this graph for a breakdown of enquiries for five desks and under:

The graph shows that overall Q1 produced more enquiries from small businesses. Only requests for single desks provided a higher volume of enquiries in Q2. However, these figures show that many small businesses are experiencing enough growth in order to justify an office – which is a positive step forward for the start-up industry.

Furthermore, a report by the British Bankers Association shows that small businesses have received more loans over recent months – with a massive increase of £391m in June 2009, and a further 50,000 small businesses setting up new banking relationships during this time.

“These figures provide more evidence of the high street banks’ support for small businesses,” says BBA statistics director, David Dooks. “Numbers of new business relationships continued to hold up, perhaps reflecting improved business confidence in trading conditions.”

Recent government figures show that SMEs in the UK employ a massive 13.5m people, which is 59% of the UK’s entire total private sector workforce. According to officebroker.com’s Q1 and Q2 statistics, enquiries for two desks produced 21.7% of all 2009 enquiries – which shows that just short of one quarter of all of their office space enquiries came from businesses with just two employees.

In addition, SMEs are classed as any business with up to 250 employees. Therefore if these figures included enquiries of up to 250 desks, the overall percentage would be considerably higher.

Link: http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/office-home/office/office-space-sme-up.shtml