What this model is for

Your office lease has an end date. Somewhere between now and then you have to choose between renewing, resizing in place, relocating, consolidating sites, or moving to serviced space. These options are not comparable on the number your agent will quote.

Renewing, regearing, relocating and consolidating carry different capital profiles, different one-off costs and different exit liabilities. Rent is typically only half to two-thirds of what a building actually costs to occupy. A rent-free period and a landlord contribution are designed to make an expensive option look cheap on the one metric agents use. And an option that cannot be delivered in the time you have left is not an option at all, whatever it costs.

This model produces a one-page appraisal you can put in front of a board, with the assumptions behind every figure recorded next to it.

Main features

Gates before cost. Four tests — capacity, lead time, capital, commitment — each returning Pass, Conditional or Fail against a threshold you set, with the margin stated in words. Options that fail are not ranked on cost. For every failed gate the model states what would have to change: the headcount at which the option becomes adequate, the ratio that would make it fit, the capital ceiling that would accommodate it, the date by which it would have needed to start.

The full occupancy cost pool. Ten recurring lines including out-of-hours air conditioning, which is a real cost in Asian markets and appears in no lease. One-off costs include dual running, professional fees, transaction tax, deposits, dilapidations and technical migration — the comms room rebuild that is often larger than the removal invoice.

Flexible and traditional on one comparison. An all-inclusive monthly desk rate and a leased floor are levelled onto the same cost pool, with the implied area per desk of each reported against your own space standard.

Gross-to-net conversion. Enter the area as the lease states it and the building’s efficiency ratio beside it. The model derives the net area for every comparison against your space standard and carries the ratio to the summary, so the assumption is on the record rather than in someone’s calculator.

Run-rate against Year 1 cash. The stabilised annual cost and the first-year funding requirement are reported separately. A long rent-free period can make an expensive option the easiest one to start; a board needs both numbers.

A minus twenty per cent stress test. One switch re-runs every gate and every cost at reduced headcount. In the supplied worked example the answer reverses: the renewal that failed on capacity becomes the cheapest option by a wide margin.

Blank cost lines are estimated, not zeroed. An unanswered cost is scaled from your current building rather than treated as nil, so an option nobody has fully quoted looks dearer rather than cheaper. Every option carries a Complete, Estimated or Incomplete label through to the summary.

How to work with it

Complete the Requirement sheet before you look at a single option. It returns how many desks you need, how much area, how long you actually have after approval time and contingency, and whether the review should already have started. That output alone is worth taking to a board.

Then the current position, on the same cost pool every option is measured on. Then the options, from your own agents’ proposals and your own quotes.

The first pass takes two to three hours, most of it spent finding numbers about your own building that nobody has had reason to assemble before. Waiting for agents to supply the rest takes one to two weeks — that is the market, not the workbook.

Why you need it

Because the alternative is a comparison built by the party selling you the space, on a metric designed for negotiation.

What is included

A fully populated London worked example, so you can see every output before you fill anything in. A blank template with 1,056 formulas, explicit blank-input handling and no hidden error suppression. A 25-page user guide in English, and the same guide in Traditional Chinese — localised rather than translated, with a short VAT chapter and a considerably longer Hong Kong section.

What is not included

No market rents, construction rates or benchmark costs are supplied. Every figure is your own lease terms and your own quotes. The model does not produce lease accounting balances, does not calculate tax, and does not natively handle North American base-year operating expense escalations — the guide explains the workaround for that one market. Every other supported market is handled natively.

Built for the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and New York, with each market’s measurement and cost conventions set out in the guide.

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