Buying or leasing commercial office space is one of the biggest decisions a business owner or professional can make. The location, ease of access and appearance of your office will have a dramatic impact on your business for years and even decades to come. Yea, we all know and love the saying the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location. But what I want to do is challenge you to think about location a little differently.
The metaphor I want you to use is hockey, not golf. Let me explain. In golf, one of the most important yet often overlooked parts of the game, especially for amateurs, is being able to find your ball. If you can't find your ball, the penalty is stroke and distance, in essence a two-stroke penalty. Ouch! You don't win many of your bets with your playing partners if you lose a lot of balls. Knowing the location of your golf ball is very important indeed.
The real estate equivalent in golf is to know what location or locations are hot today. It is great to know what location is perceived to be the most prestigious, the easiest to access, or the best know. I encourage you to take a close look at these factors when evaluating a potential location for your business. But there is another way to look at location, and for this method, hockey is the better metaphor.
In hockey, Wayne Gretzky's father Walter is credited with the immortal advice, "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Because if you start to skate to the puck, by the time you arrive at its original location, it we be somewhere else. Relying sole on where something is right now is a dangerous way to analyze a situation, even for very short-term decisions like where to skate in hockey. In dealing with long-term decisions, like where to buy commercial real estate, the results can be costly or worse.
What this means in real estate is that you will make much better decisions if you look ahead one, five or even ten years down the road when evaluating a location. If you pay top dollar for a location that is well situated today, but that is near the point where it will slowly become less and less attractive in the future, you will probably regret your decision. Alternatively, if you dismiss a slightly less attractive area today that is in an area that is growing and improving month by month, year by year, you may miss out on real bargains.
So what should you do? I recommend that you evaluate the trends of a location just as much as you evaluate the existing conditions. A location that is on the edge of town today, but right in the middle of the development and growth path may be a much better choice that a location that is just now starting to lose some of its former glory.
When someone comes to your place of business, they get out of their car and the first thing they see when the approach is your front door. A great way to make a powerful and professional first impression is with a fantastic and unique doorknob. Most people walk through doors all day without taking more than a moment's look at the knob they turn just long enough to get a hold on it. Choosing the right door knobs for both the inside and outdoor doorways to your business can be just as important to the image of your business as a logo or name.