Kevin Wither, head of our landlord division, discusses the benefits of ready-to-work spaces and how Peldon Rose’s dedicated Landlord offering is unique to the market

How does a landlord’s needs differ from those of an occupier?

An occupier is much more about “what can I get out of this space?”, whereas a landlord focuses on “how can I make this space unique to the market?”.

An occupier is very specific, they can have 100 people working for them to do a specific task, or a series of specific tasks. Their office needs to suit those requirements and needs. The power of a good design and build company is that they capture every single one of those needs and design the perfect office that will answer all of them.

A landlord might not know who is looking at their space, or what kind of business they are. They need to create an offering that could potentially fit anyone. The landlord market is different, the needs are aligned differently - what is the most rent value they can get out of a space, with the minimum capex, to a high-quality.

How does moving from a serviced office to ready-to-work differ?

The main target audience for ready-to-work schemes are growing businesses; companies of around 20-30 people, possibly just come out of a shared office space. They have received everything from their shared office provider – free beer, free coffee, free croissants, meeting spaces – it never factored into their needs.

Agents have had to show these people around an empty shell, hoping the tenant buys into an idea and an inspiration and hope that they creative imagination – which can be really challenging.

A ready-to-work space does everything co-working provide can do - but on a bigger scale. We add features, design, desk layout, technology – all we need is branding input and design, which the agents have bought in to. The space because the space sells itself. Tenants don’t have to imagine – they can touch, and they can feel. That’s the value of ready to work.

How do wellbeing and sustainability influence ready-to-work?

They haven’t always but, they are important to everything now, including office design, and landlords are having to respond to those requirements. It’s an advantage for them to be able to say we’ve incorporated biophilia, gyms, bike storage, air purifiers etc. These are things they never had to worry about before because it would fall into the Cat B.

But the evolution of the office is leading things like BREEAM, SKA, WELL – all of those things become more important to employee wellbeing and retention, an office is also part of the attraction for working at a business, and underpins company culture.

What is it about your team that makes them so effective at what they do?

We’re a newly formed yet experienced team, we’re inspired by saving the world, by ecology and sustainability. Coming into this team, they’re able to really make an impression and do something different.

Project designers Jess Wing and Arbi Nazarian came from Peldon Rose’s technical design team, understand our culture, ways of working and building a client for life. Everyone is pulling in the same direction and understands the value of the landlord offering, both to the business but also to the market, and what is really exciting is, they’re all ready to do something different.

Where do you add value to a project?

We offer our clients, an expert team who want to achieve the very best. We want the building to work hard for our client - the landlord. If there is a possibility for the business to follow up with the tenant for additional work, we’re able to support here, too.

There has never really been a landlord focused design and build company that is doing what we’re doing with a pure landlord focus. Our foundations in working with tenants mean we know what tenants need, we have a design mentality of making sure the spaces aren’t benign, that they actually work. We know from an office design perspective that it does still inspire people to be in an office.

But also have a mind to challenge innovation, challenge look and feel, challenge finishes of a building, to try and rebrand that building, we work with landlords as they get lease breaks in the floors, we can integrate the same design and the same finishes throughout the building.