Technology Changes Use of Office Space

Now that so much technology is available to SME businesses, the need for office space has been drastically reduced.

The effect of this can be seen in lower prices being advertised for office unit leases, and office units unused and vacant. But what are the causes ?

The UK is still engaged in a drift towards a more service based economy. Services don't need product storage space, whether in-house or through outsourced warehousing services, and therefore no need to have physical space to either display or store products.

Also with the move towards out-sourced business units, core work-force sizes are shrinking, and business networks are growing. Why invest in a permanent skill set when the same skills can be found and brought in for specific tasks as and when needed, and not retained on a year-round basis. Services can now be found in abundance to help with marketing, sales, warehousing and distribution, accounts and customer service.

So the move away from physical products and the fragmenting of business operations all mean less core office space is needed. What will business centre managers do about using spare capacity ?

Our resident business consultant, Peter Jones of Blue Oyster Innovation, tells us that office suites are now getting better at recognising the need for office space purely for display and presentation purposes. He is aware of the growth of specialist service providers who can organise room space on a daily basis to take advantage of capacity outages in office suites.

Whilst bigger business centre owners already have their own software to target maximum usage from the available office space, smaller business centre owners had better wake up to the opportunity to increase their revenues and take full cashflow advantage of their capital assets.