A virtual office provides your business with a physical business address, without having to spend thousands of pounds a year on commercial office rental, and their popularity has skyrocketed in recent years.

A big part of this was the acceleration of remote and hybrid working trends following the Covid pandemic, but in the five years since the first lockdown the numerous benefits of a virtual office have led more and more business owners to shift to this operating model.

Ready to find out why your small business or startup should be taking advantage of a virtual office solution? Let’s take a closer look at these nine benefits of virtual office space.

1. Protect privacy

When registering a new business with Companies House you must provide a genuine UK address where you’ll be able to receive official legal correspondence, or be notified that this post has been received. As of March 2024, this can no longer be a PO Box.

Some business owners use their family residence as their official company address if they don’t have a physical office. However, registered company addresses are publicly available information, meaning your privacy is at risk if you use your home address. A virtual office fulfills Companies House’s criteria for a registered business address while ensuring disgruntled customers won’t turn up on your doorstep asking for refunds.

2. Cost-effectiveness

One of the most important virtual office advantages is how cost-effective they are as a solution compared to commercial office rental.

According to data provided by Statista, the cost of office space in the UK ranges from £40 per square foot per year in Leeds, up to a massive £142.50 per square foot per year in London’s West End—and that’s without taking into account all of the additional overhead costs that come with having an office, such as equipment and utilities costs.

By contrast, a virtual office London address can start from as little as £18 per month, while saving potentially thousands per year on the associated costs of having a physical office.

A virtual office will also save your employees a significant amount of money per year on commuting costs, representing a significant employee benefit that won’t cost you anything to provide.

3. Professional business address

One reason a small business owner might want to rent a commercial office space is to ensure the company appears more professional and established to potential customers—and this is another of the key benefits of a virtual office.

For example, the virtual office address provided by Hoxton Mix is in a prime London location, providing your customers, clients, suppliers and investors with a much better impression of your business compared to if you were simply using your home address.

4. Flexibility and freedom

Although a physical office location provides you and your employees with a dedicated space to work from, it can also be quite restrictive. After all, if you’re paying thousands of pounds per year on an office you want to make sure it’s being used.

One of the great advantages of remote work is the flexibility and freedom to work from anywhere in the world, and a virtual office service facilitates this by ensuring you can still receive all of your business correspondence from any location.

5. Better work-life balance

This flexibility feeds into the next advantage of a virtual office: work-life balance.

Although your working hours might still be the classic 9-to-5, remote working models improve work-life balance for you and your employees in a number of ways.

First of all and most notably, you eliminate all of that time spent commuting to the office every day. According to government statistics, the average commuting time in England is 28 minutes, or 56 minutes per day. That’s over 200 hours every year.

What’s more, working from home makes it much easier for people to take care of simple household chores during the week, rather than having to spend their weekends doing the washing up, laundry and so on. However, this isn’t at the expense of worker productivity, with research showing that remote teams are actually 5% more productive than onsite employees.

A virtual office also emotionally anchors your business for your customers, clients and employees without the hassle of a true office.

6. Access to partners

Virtual office providers typically offer additional supporting virtual business services, such as virtual office phone numbers, meeting room hire and more.

At Hoxton Mix, our customers can also secure a wide range of discounts and special offers on crucial business services. Our partner discounts for Hoxton Mix customers include:

90% off for six months with Xero accounting software
25% off Slack Business+
Up to $350,000 in Microsoft technology benefits through Microsoft for Startups
One year of free bank transfers and £75 cashback with Tide

There are many more benefits available for our virtual office customers, so check out our Marketplace to find out more.

7. Virtual networking opportunities

One of the drawbacks of remote working is that you lose that face-to-face time that comes with being in the same building, but fortunately modern software solutions can still provide plenty of virtual networking opportunities that support collaboration and team building.

You’ll have the chance to interact with other remote workers and partners with conferencing platforms, participate in virtual coworking spaces and collaborate in real-time on documents—all from any global location—so don’t let this concern hold you back from enjoying all the benefits of virtual office space that are on offer to your business.

8. Scalability for small businesses

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses is figuring out how to scale sustainably. For example, if you’ve seen strong sales growth you might need to expand your team beyond the capacity of your current office, but is that sales performance reliable enough to safely commit to paying increased commercial rent for another 12 months?

On the flip side, if sales are weak you’ll struggle to downsize when locked into a commercial office lease.

This is why scalability is one of the biggest and most important advantages of a virtual office. You can expand your business operations quickly without being constrained by the size of an office, while the cost of growth is also significantly reduced. At Hoxton Mix, we also offer flexible pay-monthly plans that can be scaled up or down as you need, or cancelled at any time.

9. AI capabilities

Some providers, including ourselves at Hoxton Mix, are also embracing artificial intelligence to further enhance the virtual office service.

In addition to our customers receiving scanned digital copies of all business correspondence, we use AI to provide mail summaries that provide a short overview of each letter, extracting key details including dates, deadlines, monetary values, contact information and more. This saves you a huge amount of time and helps you to understand what post needs the most attention. We can also automatically detect the sender information so you know what correspondence is the most important.

What’s more, our AI software will categorise and tag your mail by sector and provide a simple search and discover feature to support team members or departments that have a specific scope, helping them to find what matters to them much faster. They’ll also be able to search all digital mail for any word, reference number or account ID, further streamlining the process of reviewing business correspondence.

Here at Hoxton Mix we believe these virtual office advantages are worthwhile for any business. If you’d like to find out more about how you can benefit from them, get in touch with us today.

Alternatively, check out the different packages we have on offer and get started within minutes.