We recently moved the Chris Worfolk Foundation office to a different business centre in Leeds city centre. Given that we are in serviced offices, you would imagine that this would be a simple process. After all, all those adverts talk about getting a new office overnight so what could be simpler?
Of course, it actually isn’t that simple.
Firstly, when we tried to cancel our existing contract with Forsyth, we were told we couldn’t, as we had to give at least two months written notice and it was too close to the deadline to do this – that means that we had to sign a new agreement with them, otherwise we would go onto what was referred to as their rack rate, which had never been mentioned before, but was apparently very, very expensive.
Instead, they proposed that we simply re-sign a three month agreement, at an additional cost of £22 per month because rent is higher for short term contracts. Interesting, I say rent, but it isn’t actually rent as part of the agreement is that you’re not actually a tenant, you’re a “service user” so allow them to get round a lot of the laws set up to protect tenants.
They also insisted on a higher deposit, which meant we had to make an additional deposit payment of £69.60.
They also charge a “minimum flat fee” of £60 per workstation (we have two in the office) for redecorating the office into it’s original state, even though as part of the agreement, you have to return it to them in the originate state, or they charge you extra for this.
So, when you add up the maths, it comes out like this:
- Extra three months enforced office rent: £914.40
- Extra business service fees incurred for those months: £215.94
- Extra business rates incurred for those months: £57
- Standard repair bills for a pristine office: £120
That makes a total cost of £1,307.34. Of course, this wasn’t a huge surprise to us, as it’s all detailed in the agreement that we signed when we took on the office. What is more of a surprise is just how much it all adds up when you actually do the figures.
On top of that, when we got the office the door lock wasn’t working properly. I spoke to the centre manager and sent numerous emails over the course of the year to get it fixed and every time I was promised it would be, but it never was.
As a result of the problem, the door handle ended up breaking and still nothing was done about it. Yet once we had moved out, we were then given an extra bill for £120 to fix the door we had apparently broken (this is on top of the repair bills, which don’t actually repair anything).
That makes a total cost of £1,427.34. A bill the charity certainly did not need!
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Tags: forsyth, leeds, offices, serviced offices
This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2012 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.