Serviced space is quoted per desk per month, so it looks cheap next to a lease. The honest comparison is the one below: what a serviced suite costs your team each month, and the headcount at which taking your own floor starts to win.
The appeal of serviced space in Lagos is not the rent. It is that the things which quietly consume a Nigerian office budget — diesel, a generator, bandwidth, a facilities manager — are somebody else’s problem and somebody else’s capital.
Serviced space wins on cash and on speed. A lease wins on unit cost, but only once you are big enough to spread the fixed costs — and only if you can fund one to two years of rent in advance.
It is not really about headcountA desk in a dense serviced plan occupies far less chargeable area than the ten square metres a company gives itself on its own floor. That, not scale, is why serviced often wins.
It is about rent and densityThe calculator gives you the rent per square metre below which your own space wins, at the density you choose. Lower the density or the rent and the answer flips.
And about cashA lease wants one to two years of rent before you move in, plus the fit-out. Serviced wants a deposit. For most growing businesses that difference decides it on its own.
A lease buys other thingsYour own identity, control of the fit-out, and a rent fixed for the term while serviced rates reprice annually. Those are real, they are just not cheaper.
We take space in Lagos ourselves and deal with the operators and landlords who matter. Send us your team size, district and budget and we will shortlist what is genuinely available — serviced or leased.
