Where do office moves first become visible?
An office move is decided over 6–24 months, and most of that deciding leaves marks in public registers: a lease clock that forces the question, filings that show the company changing shape, planning activity that shows works being designed, hiring that shows space running out. None of these is an announcement. All of them are visible to anyone who looks — which is the entire opportunity, because almost nobody looks systematically.
This guide covers the process: which sources to work, how early each one fires, and how to turn them into a repeatable pipeline. For the signal-by-signal field guide — all ten indicators with sources — see the companion page, signs a company is about to move office.
Start with the lease clock
The lease event is the anchor signal because it forces a decision onto a calendar: at expiry or break, the occupier must renew, renegotiate, relocate or restructure — and each option means appointing advisers and spending money. HM Land Registry’s registered-lease records are public and include start dates and terms, from which expiry windows follow.
Two caveats that catch beginners. First, leases of seven years or under are often unregistered, and flex/serviced agreements never appear — so lease data under-represents smaller and younger occupiers. Second, the raw record names the tenant at registration, which may not be who sits there today; matching a lease to the current occupier is the single hardest part of doing this manually, and where most DIY attempts quietly go wrong.
Watch planning activity on occupied buildings
A planning application on an occupied office is the loudest near-term signal there is — someone has already paid designers. Filed by the occupier, it usually means refurbishment or reconfiguration; filed by the landlord, it can mean the occupier is about to be decanted, displaced or pushed into a renegotiation — each a different kind of lead. Borough planning portals are free to search; the work is monitoring dozens of them continuously and matching applicants to companies.
Read growth: hiring and headcount against floor area
Space pressure is arithmetic. A company’s headcount (Companies House accounts, plus live job listings) divided into its building’s recorded floor area (EPC and VOA records) gives density — and past roughly one person per 8 sq m, something has to give: more space, a hybrid policy, or a move. A sustained surge of office-based vacancies is the leading edge of the same signal, especially operations, workplace and office-manager roles, which are move-adjacent hires.
Mine Companies House for change events
Filings reveal companies changing shape: new persons with significant control (acquisitions are routinely followed by consolidation or relocation), funding events (money buys headcount, headcount buys desks), registered-address history (a 40-person company still registered at a serviced-office address is a first-HQ lease waiting to happen), and — read in reverse — distress markers that tell you to deprioritise.
Use agent wires and the trade press — knowingly late
Reported requirements (“X is seeking 20,000 sq ft in the City”) are reliable and specific, but by the time a requirement is public an occupier agent is engaged and the advisory seats are filling. Treat the wire as confirmation and a competitive starting gun, not discovery. The teams that win pre-tender work are the ones already in conversation when the requirement breaks.
How early does each source fire?
| Source | Typical warning before the move | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Lease expiry | 12–24 months | HM Land Registry registered leases |
| Break clause | 9–18 months | HM Land Registry registered leases |
| Hiring surge | 6–18 months | Job boards, careers pages |
| Ownership change / funding | 6–18 months | Companies House |
| Planning application | 3–12 months | Borough planning portals |
| Reported requirement | 3–9 months | Agent wires, trade press |
| Fit-out tender | Weeks — usually too late | Tender portals |
Read the table bottom-up and the strategy writes itself: every row below “reported requirement” is where competition already sees the deal. The rows above it are where relationships are formed.
Find the decision-maker before you call
Who owns the move varies with size: under ~50 staff it is usually the founder, MD or finance director; from ~50–250 an operations director or office manager runs it with FD sign-off; above that, dedicated workplace, property or facilities leads appear, with procurement joining late. In larger projects an external occupier agent or project manager will influence the shortlist — worth knowing before you position. Open with the trigger you observed (“your lease event next autumn”), not a generic pitch.
Manual research or an intelligence platform?
Everything above is doable by hand with free public data — that is precisely why it is credible. The cost is the joining and the refreshing: matching leases to current occupiers, monitoring dozens of planning portals, recomputing density as filings land, and doing it all again every week so the picture stays current. As a one-off research exercise it takes days per hundred companies; as a standing process it is a part-time job.
That standing process is what Signal sells: 155,131 London companies tracked across the same registers, scored 0–100 weekly, each lead showing its dated evidence and a decision-maker. The honest trade: build the process if London-office BD is a side interest; buy it if the pipeline is how you eat. If you want the product view, see companies moving office in London.
What does this look like in London right now?
As of the latest weekly computation, 771 London companies are showing move-or-refit signals strongly enough to be in market, 40 of them imminently, and 382 tracked companies have a lease expiry or break inside the next 18 months. The live breakdown by district and sector — free and citable — is on the London office statistics page and the Movement Index.