|
 1.0 Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the serviced office and business centre organisations that
responded to our survey, making this report possible.
In particular we would like to thank Mr. Richard Nissen, European Director of the
Alliance Business Centres Network and Miss. Jennifer Brooke, Executive Director of the
Business Centre Association, for their invaluable advice and support in preparing this
report.
2.0 Aims and Objectives
The aim of this research is to identify issues governing the longer-term performance of
the UK serviced office sector. The objectives are to demonstrate the characteristics of the
sector and how serviced offices have performed, as an asset class, over the last decade,
from the beginning of the 1990s to 2001. In particular, it will show how the sector
performs in the peak, trough and the recovery stages of the UK economic cycle.
Presently, there seems to be some confusion within the investment community about
whether the industry follows the business or property cycle. The research expects to
identify which cycle the industry follows and whether the performance is cyclical or
counter cyclical.
3.0 Methodology
The research combined both desk research based on existing studies into the UK
property and serviced offices sector and primary research based on 35 surveyed
organisations operating in the serviced office sector.
A questionnaire was constructed around three principal themes:
- Basic information concerning the firm’s activities, its structure, pricing policy and its competitive position;
- Occupational – examining the target market for services, the mix of clientele, their average tenure and contractual conditions; and
- Qualitative – looking at the economic and business environment for serviced
offices.
Follow up work was done by contacting and interviewing operators in the industry.
To build up a clearer picture of how the industry performed over the last business and
property cycle, the operators targeted were those that had been in operation since the beginning of the 1990s. In the event this proved to be rather difficult, since the number of operators who have been in business for ten years or more is very small compared to
the number operating today. This illustrates the relative immaturity of the serviced office sector in comparison to other property related businesses.
The research anticipated a broad spread in terms of the location of serviced office operators in order to build an overall picture throughout the UK. With the help of the
Business Centre Association, operators were contacted in locations such as London,
Edinburgh, Birmingham and Leeds, among others.
In total 22 operators were interviewed covering in excess of 550,000 square feet. The
number of centres examined was 35 of which 60% were leasehold and 40% freehold.
The average size of a centre was 18,753 square feet and 69% of buildings were totally
devoted to serviced offices.
More... (open / download the report )
-
|
