Since founding Instant Offices Group in May 1999, MD Rob Hamilton has grown the company to be the largest serviced office broker by market share in every key market in the world. So what is it that sets them apart from their competitors?

“Doing business with us is the equivalent of going to a travel agent that has tried out all the holiday resorts,” explains Hamilton, “We have 50 people dedicated to sales who have an in-depth knowledge of all the key global markets. So, for example, if someone wants to rent office space in Tokyo, we have two or three sales staff who have been round all our offices there.”

Today the company has a 75-strong workforce based across its London, Miami and Sydney offices, with representative offices in France, Germany, Japan and China.

“We also provide client testimonials from previous customers. For example, we recently completed a deal in Lagos, Nigeria, where we provided the client with testimonials from three other corporates who we had already placed in that same building.”

Today Instant Offices Group supplies serviced office space to 200,000 customers, including 50 per cent of the FTSE 100 companies and Fortune 500 companies. The serviced office brokerage is also extremely popular with small businesses who like to outsource their reception service so they can focus on growing the business.

Aside from the success the company has enjoyed with its serviced office space, Instant Offices has also carved out a new niche in the market - a big factor behind their turbo-chargeded growth of over 100 per cent year-on-year since 2001.

“I noticed that there was a large part of the market that wasn’t really being catered for which was that if you’re a larger organisation that needed managed office space for two to five hundred people, there weren't many places where you could find it. So we decided to create the supply to match the demand that we thought was fairly evident in the marketplace. And I think we have been proven right,” says Hamilton.

In bridging the gap between serviced offices and the conventional office market, this service has proven enormously popular with government bodies and large corporate organisations. “We provide managed offices for the likes of Network Rail and Transport for London. We only have a small number of clients but they’re all big organisations who are looking for a one-stop-shop for managed offices on all-inclusive flexible terms.”

The company is also currently ramping up its managed office projects across the emerging markets. “A lot of corporates are looking to open offices in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia but they’re finding it’s really difficult to procure the real estate. But we’ve found a solution to the problem.”

Hamilton explains that there are already a lot of big corporates who have taken too much space in these markets so Instant Offices is matching them up with the corporates that need space. “That's a project we started working on recently which is going great guns at the moment.”

The company turned over £10.5m last year and Hamilton is projecting a £23m turnover for 2008.

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