Understanding Your Requirements
How to define your requirements before you start searching
A workspace search goes wrong long before the paperwork. It goes wrong when a team starts opening listings without agreeing on how many people need a seat, how long they are willing to be tied in, and what the monthly number can be.
Answer the five questions below first. Every filter on Yanisa maps to one of them, so once you have the answers the search takes minutes instead of weeks.
Team size and 12-month growth
Count the people who will sit in the space on a normal day, not the full headcount. Hybrid teams routinely need seats for 40-60% of their people, and paying for empty desks is the most common way a first workspace becomes expensive.
Then add the hiring you are confident about for the next 12 months. If growth is uncertain, that uncertainty is an argument for a shorter term, not for a bigger office.
How your team actually works
- Focus-heavy work — Engineering, design, writing and analysis need quiet. An open floor with no phone booths will push that work back home within a month.
- Call-heavy work — Sales, support and recruiting need booths or a cabin. Count how many concurrent calls happen at 3pm on a Tuesday, not on average.
- Client-facing work — If clients visit, you need a presentable reception and a bookable meeting room, and you need to know what that room costs per hour.
- Hybrid teams — If people come in two or three days a week, day passes across several locations often beat a fixed floor.
Budget and how you want to be billed
Set a per-seat monthly ceiling, not a total. A total budget hides the fact that a cheaper building further out can cost more per person once you add commute time and meeting room charges.
Decide the billing unit too. On-demand space is priced by the hour or the day; long-term space is priced per seat per month. Yanisa filters on both, so a price range means nothing until you pick the unit it applies to.
Location and commute
Pick the locality around your team, not around the office you would like to have. Map where people live, find the point most of them can reach in under 45 minutes, and search there first.
Distance from a metro station is the single filter that changes attendance most, especially for teams below 20 people who cannot subsidise cabs.
Term and flexibility
Be explicit about the longest commitment you are willing to sign. Lock-in is the term that is hardest to renegotiate later, and the one most often skimmed at signing.
Once these five answers exist, turn them into a search: