Business News

New tool reveals Central London office prices 242% higher than UK average

By Christy Bella | January 22, 2020

With almost 5 million self-employed people in the UK, there is a higher than ever demand for private and coworking office space. As a result, thousands of new office spaces have emerged and in Central London alone, several hundred hit the market in 2019 – an incredible rise of 42 per cent from 2018.

In order to help organisations budget for an office, online broker FreeOfficeFinder has launched the first interactive price comparison tool for private and coworking serviced office space www.freeofficefinder.com/pricing-tool.

The tool demonstrates the stark difference in pricing between Central London, with the monthly desk rate for a private serviced office at £682, and the rest of the UK at £282 – a difference of 242%.

Mayfair is unsurprisingly the most expensive area in London with the average price of a desk in a private office at £1090 per month, over seven times more expensive than in Newcastle where an average desk rate is £150 per month.

Central London itself offers some interesting statistics with the average cost of a coworking space in Westminster at just £175 per month per desk, whereas across the Thames in Southwark, it rises to £435 per month. The surprising difference in price is often reflected by the supply and demand of space over the value of the property.

In addition to a chart that lets you sort areas by price, the tool features a map that provides a bird’s eye view on office pricing in nearby areas. Users can filter preferred areas and specify desk numbers to get an approximate price on their required office size. There is even an historical section on the tool to allow journalists to create a bespoke graph for pricing over the previous 5 years, www.freeofficefinder.com/pricing-tool/historical. Every three months the tool will be updated with area price changes, in addition to improvements to the tool based on user feedback.

Nick Riesel, managing director of freeofficefinder.com commented “One of the biggest challenges faced in an office search is understanding the market price for an office. This new tool eliminates that problem, allowing a user to understand the average price for different sized offices in their chosen locations within seconds”.

FreeOfficeFinder invested a year’s work in the new tool, but Riesel is delighted with the response: “Initial feedback for the tool has been incredible. Serviced offices are moving from a niche product to a mainstream solution so it’s proving a much-needed resource in a growing market”.

FreeOfficeFinder used pricing data from over 2000 serviced offices that they monitor to support the findings.