InstantOffices News

Wednesday evenings just got a bit better.

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:25:01 GMT

IOD Wednesday Club, Heron Tower, 28th March 18.30

You may have already had a invite from for this but once a month,on a Wednesday evening, the IOD hold an informal networking event called (not surprisingly) ‘The Wednesday Club’.

We’re delighted to say that we will be hosting their next event on 28th March, 6.30pm. And we’d like to extend an invitation to you as one of our guests. Numbers are limited, so we’re not telling everyone.

What’s more the event will be held at Landmark’s Heron Tower.

You’ll be given a tour of the Tower’s business centre tower and a short (honestly) presentation followed by drinks. We’ll be on hand to answer any questions about the serviced office market.

If you are interested in attending then just click here to let us know.

This is just one of a series of networking events we’ll be holding in 2012 for our Instant Club members. What sort of events would you like us to put - let us know. Click here to tell us.

Torvill and Dean. Citibase and Instant.

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:15:41 GMT

You can’t have one. Without the other.

Well you could but it wouldn’t be good. By working together for the last 12 years Citibase and Instant have placed 100’s of businesses into their perfect offices throughout the UK . If you want to benefit from the services we can provide then get in touch now by calling 020 7298 0760 or drop us email.

A little more about Citibase
Citibase have 34 centres across the UK including centres in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Leeds. Every one of their centres offer excellent customer service and they are very scalable.

That’s probably why Citibase are one of the top three serviced office companies in the UK and growing fast.

Their mandate is pretty simple (but clearly effective). They aim to take the hassle out of finding and managing an office, which allows the client to focus on growing their own business.

So that covers the usual office things like state of the art IT and telephony, reception and administration services. But their a la carte services includes anything and everything from laminating, binding, email campaigns, spreadsheets – there is very little these guys won’t do for you.

And if that isn’t enough, clients have access to business space across the world through a partnership with the Alliance Business Centre Network. Great stuff. And it’s made even greater by working through us here at Instant because we can deliver the solution faster through our close working relationship with clients and Citibase.

Torvill wouldn’t have got an Olympic Gold performing Bolero on her own. Add in Dean and you have a winning combination. That is what Instant and Citibase have to offer. Only without all the sequins.

Take a look at the Global Serviced Office Review for your market

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:53:00 GMT

Instant Club brings you dedicated account managers

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:08:36 GMT

Meet Dan.

One of the many benefits of being a member of our exclusive Instant Club is that you get access to a dedicated account manager who will look after all your office requirements across the world.

We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce to you Dan Szweda. He looks after the Instant Club team. Dan joined us back in 2007 and within 3 years had won the ‘Broker of the Year’ award for his excellent market knowledge and the relationships he’d built with landlords and clients.

During his time as a consultant, Dan looked after the London City, Manchester and Dublin markets brokering deals with small SME’s right up to large multinationals.

Now he is in charge of the Instant Club team and looks after all four of our regions – UK, EMEA, the Americas and Asia Pacific. That’s the world basically. So wherever you need an office Dan is the man who can.

Speaking of the Instant Club he says "I see it as a way of strategically partnering with growing SME’s, assisting them with their office requirements and just generally being available to chat about the flexible office market, offer advice and help make it as easy as possible for our key clients".

If you have any questions about the Instant Club or just fancy that chat – you can get hold of Dan on
020 7298 0670 or email him here.

2012, London

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:46:19 GMT

If it were the Oscars, London would win best picture, best director, best pretty much everything.

But who are the other nominees?

We all know that the serviced office market in London is the largest and most developed in the world with over 8% of the total global market. That gives London the ability to accommodate 67,000 workstations. It sounds a lot but there are still areas in London that are relatively underdeveloped and cannot match demand; places like Chelsea, Battersea and Kensington fall into that category.

London also doesn’t have the highest monthly workstation rate; that award goes to Paris. The workstation rate there is nearly 30% higher than anywhere else in the world. Tokyo is its nearest rival.

To find out more about the London and UK market click here to download our report.

EMEA

Despite London being the biggest star, EMEA is the rising star of the serviced office market. Since 2008, we’ve witnessed a 38% increase in serviced office centres. EMEA would win best newcomer award, with Paris as its leading lady, closely followed by Dublin and Madrid.

Within EMEA, the fastest growing areas are Eastern Europe, the Middle East and more recently Africa.

Find out more about the EMEA serviced office market here.

The Americas

There are 3 centres in the Americas that are in the Top 10 globally: New York (global rank 2), Los Angeles (8) and Atlanta (9). As this would suggest, the US dominates this sector accounting for 84% of the regional market. Canada and Mexico follow with 7.8% and 3.1% respectively.

In total, the Americas represent 32% of the global market with over 30 million square feet of serviced space available; however, this represents only a tiny fraction of the commercial property available. The Americas are far from reaching maturity, though more businesses are beginning to understand the
benefits of a flexible property portfolio with the number of centres increasing by 15% since 2008.

Read more about the Americas here.

Asia Pacific

Although this region has the smallest share of the global market, it is expected to double in size by 2016. It has four centres in the global Top: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and Melbourne. These are areas where the serviced office proposition is well understood.

The Chinese, Indian markets and south east Asian markets are now waking up to the benefits of serviced offices and are expected to dominate future growth in the region. They will be the stars of the future.

Find out more about Asia Pacific, click here

The good, the bad and the ugly – what you said about the service you get from Instant.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:05:04 GMT

The results are in and counted. In summary: We’re doing an excellent job, but there is still room to improve.

The first really good bit of news for us is that of the 200 plus people who responded to our survey, 87% rate us as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ overall. So we’re really pleased with that. However that does still leave a few who rate us average or below. So we need to and will be, working much harder to win those Operators over.

We score well on things like communication, response times and accuracy but although we are ‘hungry to close deals’ and we’re sending good volumes of leads through – we need to improve our success rate of closing those deals with you.

In terms of advertising your centers on our website, we score very well across the board (80% or more rating as excellent or good) apart from the ‘positioning in our listings’. We do our best to accommodate all requests, but remember we have an awful lot of properties to list.

More than half ranked the quality of staff as second to none. This is borne out in some of the comments that were left. A lot of individuals here at Instant were singled out for praise. That’s really great to see.

As for what things you think we could do to add value to your business, that seems to be more of everything – more leads, more viewings, more deals. We will be working hard to help you achieve these goals throughout 2012.

So in summary, we are doing some very good stuff, and we’re developing good relationships with Operators but there are areas where can improve and we’ll be focusing on those in 2012.

Thanks to everyone who completed the survey.

We asked, you told us – now we’re going to do stuff

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:25:29 GMT

What are we doing to improve?

As you already know we have one of the largest teams of dedicated professionals in the business. They are all fully trained and work really hard to make sure leads are qualified and have all the information needed before they are passed into the market. In fact we’ll actually be getting more client information into those leads this year so that you can make the most of our referrals.

Hopefully that will mean you will be better placed to close the deal.

So that’s one thing we’re doing to make things better and now we’d like to share with you some more new initiatives that we’ll be working on as a result of your feedback from the recent Operator Survey.

Firstly, we’re working on ways that we can improve our website. We’ll do this by;

Improving the clarity of the listings
Adding better quality photos
Including more detailed property descriptions
Adding more client reviews
Increasing the number of properties sourced and listed by recruiting more staff into our research team

In response to increasing Global demand for serviced offices, the web guys will also;

Be building a number of additional language sites
We’ll be expanding our multilingual sales team so that we can better service those markets

We want to start an education programme that promotes the benefits of the serviced office market and really raise the profile of what you and we have to offer businesses across the World.

So we’ll be delivering;

More industry research and insight
More press and media coverage
Facilitating and attending more conferences and networking events
Taking part in more industry related exhibitions
Developing a whole new CRM programme involving telephony, email and other channels like Twitter and LinkedIn. (There will be more on this in our next update)

Oh and one more thing, you’ll probably be seeing a lot more of us this year. We’re encouraging our sales teams to get out and about, meeting you and visiting your centers so they have a really good understanding of what you are trying to achieve. And likewise, if you ever want to come and see us - our door is always open.

Challenges for the serviced office market in 2012

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:20:33 GMT

You’ve told us what is keeping you awake at night.

Our recent Operator survey, which over 200 of you completed , asked the question ‘what is the biggest challenge you and your business face?’ The state of the economy and the impact it has on business expansion featured heavily. No surprise there!

Linked to that were concerns around being able to reduce vacant space and the pressure from clients and prospective clients to reduce rates.

Some smaller Operators who specialise in high quality serviced offices are finding clients shifting to lower cost office spaces. Again a result of the slow and unpredictable economy.

But its far from all bad news, many Operators are actually struggling to meet demand and quote high levels of growth in the serviced office market. For some, the only challenge is to be able to continue to deliver that level of growth year on year. A nice challenge to have.

This is reflected in our Global Serviced Office Review where we reported that the serviced office market had grown 19% during the recession. Businesses continue to introduce flexibility into their property portfolio, reducing their risk and exposure. That is a great selling point in these straightened and unpredictable times.

Moving on to other challenges, a theme which cropped up regularly was the sales funnel. Specifically getting quality and qualified leads, turning inquiries into viewings and then the length of time clients take to make decisions. The latter is again a symptom of the economy as businesses become more cautious about spending budgets.

Find out what improvements we're making in 2012 >

Instant Market Update.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:13:58 GMT

Although 2011 was a tough year for many businesses, the flexible office market, yet again, withstood most of the challenges presented to it. We’ve seen many indications that the market for serviced office space is developing well and proving more than sustainable.

We saw a global increase in inquiry levels of nearly 8% compared to 2010 whilst at the same time we were able to achieve a record number of deals in the calendar year. We believe that 2012 will continue to be a challenging year, but the initial indications are positive with high lead flow and high deal numbers being achieved in most markets.

In localised markets, the UK saw an increase in both leads and deals. Leads were up nearly 23% compared to 2010 while deal volume rose by nearly 15%. To cope with these extra volumes we also increased the number of staff working in our sales team. We now have over 50 staff dedicated solely to sales.

In the EMEA region we also saw rising deal volumes - up 15% on 2010. This has resulted in a significant up lift in the contract values we are achieving with Operators. If you are thinking about booking your holiday, don’t book one for June as it is the busiest month for deals in both the UK and EMEA.

The Americas continues to grow with new buildings being added across the US and Canada with many new sites being added in South America too. As a whole, lead volume has increased year on year since 2010.

Our Asia Pac team based in Sydney has grown to a team of 5 to help us with growing demand for flexible office space. We witnessed a small increase in transactions in 2011 compared to 2010, but the really good news is that average workstation rates are on the up.

Instant’s Global Sales Director, Patricia Bacon looks forward to 2012:

“2012 has started well for Instant and we have seen a big increase in deal numbers in all global regions and there are very strong volumes of inquiries coming in. We are seeing high levels of viewings and many clients committing early. Whilst the economy remains turbulent, this is reassuring.

Our global reach means that we are working with small and medium sized companies as well as the larger Corporate businesses, helping them find office space around the world, be that a 2nd office or dipping their toe in to new markets overseas. This is a real focus for us - bringing more business to all our Operators whilst reinforcing the benefits of having flexible offices as part of an organisation’s portfolio of properties. It has also been good to see so many of you looking to expand in to new areas and asking for our advice and guidance.”.

Patricia and all of us here at Instant look forward to another successful year with you, our Operators.

Meet Deirdre, Patty and Melissa – our Corporate Solutions team

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:35:14 GMT

Keeping executives sweet with executive suites. With a bit of boxing thrown in.

Well you have met the team who chases the bills, but we also wanted to introduce our Corporate Solutions team. This newly formed team are dedicated to meeting, advising and delivering property solutions to organisations all over the globe.

Instant are the only flexible office brokerage that has a team dedicated to servicing the property needs of the Fortune 500 and large corporate clients. Now the team is expanding to provide our US based clients with a dedicated Client Account Manager.

Whilst you will already know Jennifer Sargent’s team in Boca Raton, the Corporate Solutions team are creating a new way of working with businesses. With over 40 years experience between them, there is no other broker, consultant or agent that can provide the level of service and expertise afforded to our extensive network of corporate customers.

Patty arrived at Instant in 2011 bringing with her 20 years of serviced office experience (she must enjoy it). Patty is a keen golfer and teaming up with her husband has won a number of twilight tournaments. She has also competed in CoreNet golfing outings.

Deirdre has over 10 years of international real estate experience. Outside of work, sport plays a large part in her life. She has participated in sport most of her life. Now, with four children, she has joined the board of some of her kids sports programmes and is a passionate fundraiser for them.

Melissa joined Instant after 6 years at one of the largest serviced office operators. She prides herself on full portfolio management. The only thing she does by half are the half marathons she runs regularly in Dallas. And as far as closing deals goes, she will never throw in the towel. She has recently taken up boxing. We’re talking proper boxing here not fitness class boxing but Rocky style boxing, training three of four times a week with professional MMA fighters. According to Mel this gives her the level of fitness she needs to keep up with her 2 year old daughter. It’s just as well she didn’t have twins!

Name: Patty Vozzo
Start Date: October 2011
Title: Global Account Director
Telephone: 267 613 8408
Email: pv@instantoffices.com

Name: Deirdre McDonald
Start Date: October 2011
Title: Global Account Manager
Telephone: 949 200 7690
Email: dmcdonald@instantoffices.com

Name:Melissa Bloom
Start Date: December 2010
Title: Global Account Manager
Telephone: 520 260 4697
Email: mb@instantoffices.com