Office moves don’t start with an announcement. They start with a lease clock, a planning application, a hiring surge — events that sit in the public record months before anyone calls a contractor. Here are the 10 signals that matter, how early each one shows, and where to find it.
The single most reliable clock. Most office decisions are made in the 6–18 months before a lease ends — the occupier must renew, renegotiate or move, and each option means appointing advisers. Registered leases, their start dates and terms are public record.
A break is a decision forced onto the calendar: exercise it or commit for years. Companies review their space strategy hard in the year before a break date — even the ones that stay often refit as the price of staying.
Planning filed on an occupied office is the loudest near-term signal there is — someone has already paid designers. Filed by the occupier, it means refurbishment; filed by the landlord, the occupier may be pushed to decant or renegotiate.
Headcount is the input; floor area is the constraint. A sustained surge of office-based vacancies (not field or remote roles) means the space equation is being stressed. Watch for operations, workplace and office-manager hires — those are move-adjacent roles.
Cross-reference employee counts against the building’s recorded floor area and you get density. Past ~1 person per 8 sq m, something has to give — more space, hybrid policy, or a move. This is arithmetic anyone can do; few bother.
New owners rationalise. Acquisitions, buyouts and new persons-with-significant-control are routinely followed by consolidation, rebrand-driven refits, or relocation to the parent’s footprint.
A funding round buys headcount, and headcount buys desks. Series A–C companies are the most space-volatile occupiers in the market — many are also in flex space with short commitments, so they can act fast.
A 40-person company still registered at a serviced-office address is a first-HQ lease waiting to happen. Flex is priced for convenience, not scale — finance directors eventually notice.
Minimum energy standards keep tightening, and buildings below the line can’t be re-let without works. Occupiers in poorly-rated stock face rising service costs and landlord works — both classic move triggers. For refurb-side suppliers, the landlord works ARE the lead.
Not every signal is an opportunity. Overdue accounts, strike-off notices and winding-up petitions mean deprioritise — a company fighting for survival is not fitting out an office. Knowing who to stop chasing is worth as much as knowing who to call.
The compounding rule. No single signal is a verdict — a lease expiry alone might just mean renewal. The predictive power is in combination and recency: an expiring lease plus a hiring surge plus density pressure is a company that has already started deciding. That’s exactly what Signal’s 0–100 score measures, weekly, across 155,131 London companies — the method behind the London Office Movement Index.
Signal reads all of this continuously and hands you the scored shortlist for your patch — who’s in market, why, and who to call.
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