Leasing Versus Membership
When searching for an office to rent near you, it might help to think about whether you want to lease an office or find a coworking space that offers a membership. There are pros and cons to each option, but coworking tends to offer the most flexibility due to not locking you into any long term obligations.
Leasing an office directly from a property manager means you’ll likely need at least a 6 – 12 month contract. This length of contract provides a lot of stability to the property manager, but it may cause you problems if you need to break the lease before the renewal period is up. In the end, leasing an office space could become more costly and frustrating compared to other options.
Coworking provides many benefits, including offering memberships instead of leasing contracts. At VentureSpace, both of our Flex-Desk (part-time and full-time) plans are available as month-to-month memberships. That means you can tell us to end your membership at the end of the current month, and there won’t be any additional charges to make that happen regardless of if that’s a 30-day or 1-day notice. For our Reserved Desk plans and higher (including all office plans), we ask for a month’s notice. Whenever you’re ready to leave or change your membership, let us know and we’ll only bill the next month’s invoice before applying those changes to your account.
This flexibility means that if it doesn’t work out or you wind up needing a larger office, you’re not on the hook for a 6 – 12 month lease or early termination fees. For today’s rapidly changing world, we like to think our approach to offering office space in Norman results in an easy, comfortable experience compared to leasing your own office space.
Amenities & Benefits
When you lease an office space directly from a property manager, you’ll typically only have amenities that you provide. For larger teams, that might be easy and ideal. You get to choose your own coffee and tea setups, snacks and refreshments, water dispensers, printers and office supplies, extra lighting and tech equipment, recreational assets like massage chairs or ping pong tables, and anything else your work environment requires.
At a coworking space, many of those amenities are provided for you by the coworking staff. For our members at VentureSpace, we provide coffee, bi-weekly professional cleaning for our open office work areas, plenty of easily accessible filtered water sources, snacks, refreshments, a massage chair, ping pong table, printer, and office supplies. Our members can simply show up, grab a cup of coffee, and dive into their day instead of brewing their own.
Amenities like that may seem small, but over the course of a full year, showing up to already-made coffee versus having to brew your own everyday winds up feeling pretty convenient. Plus, we get to explore different types of coffee together whenever we find a new type that we’d like to try out. It’s fun to break out a seasonal blend one day to hear how it compares to our normal brew.
Work Culture & Networking
If you’re leasing your own office, the workplace culture and opportunities for networking may wind up limited to the culture you and your team bring to work, and the networking opportunities you create. This might be fine for some teams, but solopreneurs and small teams may benefit quite a lot from the diversity that a coworking space provides.
Working at a coworking space means you get to network with people from other companies, giving you the opportunity to learn about their type of work and the company they’re at alongside getting to know them on a personal level.
