The choice of premises for your business is a crucial step since the location of your office, its interior design, and other characteristics can significantly affect the profitability of your business. If you are a novice entrepreneur, we advise you to read our following tips to help you make the right choice.
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Do you need an office?
First, you should make the decision on the following issue: do you really need to rent any premises for an office? In a number of cases, you can get by with a virtual office, for example, if you are a freelancer-designer, or a programmer, or provide services for content management. Such a service as a virtual office – Flexi-desk is available for these categories in the free zones of the UAE. This allows you to reduce your expenses significantly, especially in the first months when there is no stable income. But, if due to the specifics of your business, this option does not suit you, there must be a commercial premise. You can search the one by yourself (in any jurisdiction in the UAE, there is a commercial real estate fund from which you can choose something), or you can use the services of specialists from a consulting company. They will help both in the process of company registration and in the search and rental of real estate. -
The location of your office.
The location of your office is a very important criterion for the success of the whole business. Offices in the city center or near transport hubs, for sure, are much more expensive than offices in residential areas. Therefore, it is advisable to choose a premise in a city center only when the activities of your company are associated with regular visits of customers to your office. If customer visits are expected to be rare, you can save by choosing a cheaper premise, but in a less busy area. If you register a company in the UAE free zone, the choice of your office is limited by your jurisdiction. For local companies on the mainland, there are no restrictions on the location of the office. -
Requirements for the commercial premises.
Before inspecting the first option, an entrepreneur must clearly understand what a future office should be in terms of area, number of rooms in order to comfortably accommodate all employees, to determine whether a room for clients or a sufficient partition in a common room are needed. It is advisable to know exactly how many employees will work for you, whether there are any plans to expand the staff in the future. If you plan to hire employees in the future, it is advisable to rent the premises "considering future growth," approximately by 15-20% bigger than that necessary at the moment. This is much more profitable than move to other office in future. Besides, knowing the number of employees, an entrepreneur can understand how many phone numbers are needed, what Internet access channel is needed, etc. An important thing! We should note the following – the number of residence visas you can get for your employees most often is determined by the area of your office. As a rule, the following approach is applied + 1 visa for every 10 sq.m. of office space.
As for the rental prices for office real estate in the UAE, they are highly dependent on the chosen jurisdiction. Thus, the rental price for 1 sq.m. of office in Dubai ranges from roughly 400-500 AED (at Dubai Investments Park) to 3,500 AED (at DIFC).
If you have questions regarding the search and selection of office space for your business, please contact our specialists, we will help to resolve this task.
