I met an interesting pair of entrepreneurs last week. They had just purchased a residential house in the Canterbury city centre and were in the process of converting it into a suite of serviced offices. The services that they planned to include were; Dedicated Receptionist, Administrative Support, Telecom service, IT infrastructure and Internet connectivity.
As well as this they were putting in the following facilities: Conference Rooms, Meeting Rooms, Heating, air conditioning and other utilities, Furniture, Full time security and Insurance.
This would be the perfect set up for any fledgling business that needed a full time base or an established business that was looking to have a higher profile than could be obtained from working at home or renting a small office and having an answer phone instead of a receptionist.
The pair owned other commercial properties as well but, interestingly, these had also started out as non-commercial.
The first property that they had purchased was a double garage, bought on auction for £8000. They had then upgraded the unit by putting a steel roof and ceiling in, burglar proofed windows, a heavy duty access door and a burglar alarm. They then rented it out as secure storage obtaining more than 3 x the rent they would have got as a garage. They then used this property to raise a loan and used the loan to purchase another 5 garages which were upgraded to the same spec and these were then geared to raise money for the Serviced offices.
Needless to say the pair were extremely bullish about the whole commercial property market and maintained that, although prices were definitely in a situation of flux, as long as you kept your head about you then there was money to be made.
And the most interesting thing about these budding property moguls? They were both only 19 years old and it was their first year out of school!
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Small Businesses benefit from Serviced offices
