How to find the perfect office for your startup in Paris
Finding an office in Paris when you are a startup is quite a hassle. It’s even harder when you have little idea of where you should be looking or even of the prices. It is also your startup’s first or second expense item, with a price point over 100k/year once your team become sizeable.
To make light on this particularly time consuming topic, we called experts and interviewed over 40 startups to understand (#1) how much they pay for their office, (#2) how they found it, and (#3) what makes them happy about it.
#1 — THE AVERAGE STARTUP OFFICE IN NUMBERS
It won’t also come as a surprise that a solid majority of the respondents are located in the 2nd, 9th and South-18th districts #silicon sentier
#2 — HOW TO FIND YOUR NEXT OFFICE?
- 0–20 people: incubators and networks
At that stage, many founders are hosted by an incubator for free or very little. Other respondents told us that they used the network of Paris & Co (RIVP). Many also found their office through Bureaux à Partager, which provides flexible leasing agreements for a reasonable price. You might also want to consider Wework (nice & pricy) or the brand new Station F (inexpensive but a bit far from the Sentier).
- Over 20 people: brokers, office hunters and DIY
In our survey, a majority of entrepreneurs with bigger teams found their office through brokers. For instance, the ones that appeared the most in the survey are BNP Real Estate and CBRE.
Plus side: they usually have a huge inventory, which will boost your research.
Down side: their commission can be substantial. It’s also important to know that their primary client is the owner of the building: they might not always be aligned with your needs.
Some intermediaries have developed another approach: they act as office “hunters”, designers, and can even advise on office policy for the startups experiencing huge growth. They get paid on the broker’s commission or use a performance based business model, and are therefore “transparent” for the company in terms of cost. For instance, CityReal Partners found and furnished offices for a handful of early-stage TheFamily startups. On the other side of the spectrum, Aktis helped Criteo and Blablacar with their office strategy during the huge headcount growth they experienced.
For the ones who want to find their next office by themselves, a good trick we learned from Deepomatic is to go look on LeBonCoin for big apartments: over 3K/month, it’s hard for the owners to find a tenant and they might agree to rent them to you if the building is company-friendly.
Another tip that we got from Hopwork: get in touch with more mature startups and try to both switch office at the same time. Hopwork managed to get a great win-win deal with Evaneos (also in Serena Capital’s portfolio), who had overgrown their office and had to move before the term of their lease.
Once they moved in, they remodelled it to their taste:
#3 — THE GOOD, AND THE VERY VERY BAD
Last but not least, we asked the founders what made them -and their team- happy about their office, and what made them regret signing the lease. When shopping for a new office, you might want to take those into account:
Last piece of advice?
“When picking a new office, it’s better not to rush into a good financial opportunity, but to think 2–5 years ahead, because moving every two years is really hard on the team. It’s also better to discuss the project with the whole team and not to keep it a secret.”
— Zeïna Peerboccus, Head of HR at Serena Capital and former Head of Talent at Doctolib
We hope that this will give you a clearer picture of the startup office landscape in Paris and help you find your next office!
Love,
Sébastien and Marie
ps : if this was useful to you, clap to let us know ;-)
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About Serena Capital
We are a capability-driven investor, bringing operational value to our portfolio companies and to the ecosystem.
More on our capability driven approach : https://blog.serenacapital.com/join-the-dark-side-971de57fa73
Find out more at www.serenacapital.com
