What's a Business Centre

What's a Business Centre?

"Business Centre" is the collective term for an office building, or often just a floor or wing of an office building, in which a company provides a range of fully serviced offices to tenants on relatively short term licenses.

In smaller towns around the world a Business Centre will normally be a whole building which is owned, or leased, by a Serviced Office Operator. The operator divides the building into smaller office suites which are then let as "serviced offices". The operator undertakes to procure all of the services that would typically be needed by a business occupier such as building maintenance, heating, lighting, air conditioning, cleaning, security, etc. Because these services can be bought in bulk by the operator they will often be less expensive than they would be when bought in smaller quantities. In addition the operator will create a smart reception area with adjoining meeting rooms which can be used by the tenants for an hourly charge. A receptionist will be employed to greet all visitors to the companies using the serviced offices.

In larger cities, perhaps with very large or high-rise office buildings, a Business Centre may only constitute a single floor of a building but in every other respect it will be operated in the same way as above. In fact sometimes there may be more than one Business Centre operating out of one large building and owned by different business centre operators.

Some business centres will provide a wider range of additional optional services such as secretarial support, IT support, photocopying services etc and these will be paid for by the tenants on an "as used" basis.

Other terms that are used in different parts of the world for much the same concept are Executive Suites (often in the USA), Executive Offices, Managed Offices or sometimes even Managed Workspace or Shared Workspace although this latter term generally relates to desk space located in a larger office which is shared by people or companies that have no business relationship to each other.

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