Companies up to 250 employees rent half of the office space in 2018

The engine is the segment of medium-sized companies with between 50 and 249 employees, which leased 114,367 sqm, representing 83% of the surface leased by SMEs.
 "The market is balanced, in terms of volume of space rented by SMEs and large companies. The most powerful segments that rent most office space are medium companies with between 50 and 249 employees and large companies with more than 250 employees.
As a trend, we’ve noticed the development of coworking office space operators, renting large areas of more than 1,000 square meters, sometimes even over 3,000-4,000 square meters, targeting micro-enterprise customers and even SMEs with between 10 and 49 employees, especially in the IT & C field. This trend we believe will continue.
At the same time, there is an increasing flexibility of developers of class A office buildings who want to have a mix of tenants in large projects. Thus, if some developers split the floors into two modules in the first stage, they now have to divide the floors into four modules, offering to rent 300-600 square meters of space, depending on the size of the floor on each floor. To benefit from this modularity of space, developers consider larger initial investments that cover the metering of each module but which provide them with more flexibility over time", says Alexandru Petrescu, Managing Partner at ESOP Consulting l CORFAC International.
The largest volume of leased Class A and B premises (approximately 96%) is achieved by medium-sized firms (which account for only 1.8% of the total Romanian firms, but have 21% of the total number of employees, according to the latest data Eurostat (European Statistical Office) and large companies (which account for only 0.4% and have 36% of total Romanian employees).
Most companies are micro-enterprises (up to 10 employees), accounting for 97.7% of the total Romanian firms and 44.4% of the total number of employees. However, they rent the smallest office space directly from the owners of new buildings, occupying about 4% of the total A-class office space. Because developers offer few options in new buildings for micro-businesses that want to have their headquarters in modern buildings , they focus on coworking spaces.

Large companies renting offices in 2018
Large companies account for 0.4% of all firms, but office transactions by firms in this category occupied 54% of the modern office market. Large companies that moved in 2018 or pre-leased office space in 2018 to move in 2019-2020 include UPC, Dell, PWC, Thales, Microsoft, Deloitte, London Stock Exchange, Schlumberger, ING etc.
At the level of Romania, according to the latest statistics provided by Eurostat, 44.4% of employees work in micro-enterprises, 20.9% in medium-sized companies and 34.6% in large companies. And at European level, the situation is close to these numbers, in the European Union, on average, micro-enterprises have 49.3% of total employees, medium companies 17.1% and large companies concentrate 33.7%. (source: ESOP)