Virtual offices are nothing new despite the recent resurgence of virtual offices in the business world. They originated in the late eighties as a way to provide office space and meeting rooms for businesses looking to avoid commutes and minimise building costs. However, in recent years their popularity has grown exponentially and now more and more small businesses are turning to virtual offices. Here we examine the reasons for this and why virtual offices have seen such a huge resurgence.

The business world has been facing incredibly tough times in recent years and business failure rates both in Australia and worldwide are at an all-time high. The world economy may be seen as tentatively recovering but the economic strains on small businesses particularly are unlikely to let up in the next decade. A recent research report from the Australian business marketing and finance company Dun and Bradstreet has found that “In 2011, failures rose 25 per cent quarter on quarter, with almost 300 firms declaring insolvency during the June quarter alone.” Over the same period the company downgraded over 200 thousand Australian firms analysing them to be at a higher risk of financial distress or insolvency in the coming year. The picture across the world is similar and understandably businesses have been desperately looking for ways to reduce costs and overheads.

The huge resurgence of virtual offices is a direct result of the added pressures that small and large businesses have been facing. As companies look to reduce staffing and other overheads virtual offices have risen to take their place. The cost of hiring secretaries, running larger offices, having support staff, meeting rooms and computers and software are astronomical if you run them all from a central location or multiple locations. Contrariwise the cost of temporarily hiring such spaces and support staff through a third party is minimal costing from as little as a few hundred dollars a month. The new generation of virtual office providers can run every support aspect of your business from providing you with a business address to taking your calls and providing your workers with places to work.

The new advances in computing have very much accelerated the rise and utility of virtual offices thanks largely to cloud computing and the huge advances we have made in digital communication and networking. Cloud computing has made it easy to  store, update and transfer work over the internet while providing remote access to software and other essential office programs from one location. Digital communication and networking advances have meant that we can communicate online and offline in new ways; enabling us to maintain business efficiency over long distances. Overall these changes have made it very easy to forgo brick and mortar offices and mitigated the need for large numbers of support staff.

For businesses this means that costs can be drastically reduced and it’s unsurprising that more and more businesses are utilising virtual offices to cut down costs and improve efficiency. The relative costs make virtual offices incredibly useful and versatile and for small businesses especially they provide a space for business operations with low costs. They have been rising dramatically in popularity with companies like Regus in Australia servicing almost 800,000 business employees on a daily basis. As businesses look to cut down on costs while still providing high levels of business service it is unsurprising that we are likely to see virtual offices continue to gain in popularity. As networking and remote business operations continue to advance with computing technology it is not unrealistic to think that many businesses will soon run free from brick and mortar overheads.