Buying Commercial Property for Your Business

The office space that we’re currently in is one Erik actually owns and bought about 2 years ago. The first office space we were in was really small although it was tri-level; go down and you’re in a basement that we used as a conference room and up to find the team’s workspace. It was in a really old building but it kept having problems. For example, the week we moved in, the AC was broken and we couldn’t move in then when it got cold out, the heat didn’t work so we had to be out of the office again. Then all along the way, there were so many problems that the team couldn’t actually work out of there consistently.

So, Erik decided to find a new office closer to where he lived. He was looked at one that was essentially just a shell of a building – concrete floors, concrete walls – and he bought it with the plan to fix it up for several reasons: 1) to get out of Norfolk and be closer to home; 2) he knew the company would be here for a couple years and it would take a while to outgrow it. He had never owned a commercial building before but he’d owned real estate so he wasn’t too concerned about it.

The downside of buying your own office space means that if one day your company went out of business, well you have a piece of property that you could then lease to someone else.
It’s worked out great, we haven’t yet outgrown it over the past 2 years but if things go well, we’ll end up outgrowing this place in about a year, two at the most and have to start looking for somewhere new.

If that’s something you’re thinking of doing, Erik recommends you do the same.