How we saved 3800 PLN on rent in an old townhouse
Rent in the center of Krakow can eat up profit faster than you think if no one watches the numbers. At Mondiairelay-suivi, we believe that an office must earn money, not just generate costs. I will tell you about how on św. Jana street we managed to knock off a specific amount from the monthly invoice.
Measurement error, or where 9 meters disappeared
In Krakow townhouses, walls can be a meter thick, and window recesses are deep as closets. Owners often add this dead space to the usable square footage you pay for. In our client's case, a logistics company, the contract specified 151 square meters on the second floor of a restored building. Something didn't sit right with the desk layout, though. We pulled out a laser rangefinder and measured every wall to the centimeter, excluding non-functional recesses and structural pillars.
It turned out that the real area where you could place a chair or a cabinet was 142.4 meters. Those missing 8.6 meters were pure fiction that the client had been paying for every month for 4 years. At a rate of 72 PLN net per meter, this gave over 600 PLN in overpayment every single month. This was not a scam by the owner; simply no one had checked the old architectural plans from the 70s that were attached to the building documentation. We count every meter because the devil is in the measurement details.
We made a professional technical layout and presented it to the townhouse manager. The reaction was predictable – first disbelief, then an attempt to defend the old rate. However, hard data from a certified device cut the discussion in 14 minutes. We entered the correct square footage in the new annex. This was the first brick in our savings, which showed that old walls have their rules, but math is the same for everyone.
Those missing 8.6 meters were pure fiction that the client had been paying for every month for 4 years.
Maintenance fees – the lump-sum trap
The second flashpoint was the so-called service charge, or maintenance fees. The owner of the townhouse on św. Jana street charged an IT company a lump sum of 21 PLN per square meter. This amount was supposed to include cleaning the stairwells, garbage disposal, security, and lighting of common areas. Sounds fair? Only on paper. We asked to see real invoices from utility providers and cleaning companies from the last 11 months. This was a key moment of our work at Mondiairelay-suivi.
After a thorough analysis, it turned out that the real building maintenance costs averaged 14.20 PLN per meter. The remaining 6.80 PLN constituted the owner's hidden profit, which is common practice in Krakow when the tenant does not ask for billing details. We'll give it to you straight: a lump sum without a final settlement is often a gift to the landlord. For an office with an area of over 140 meters, this difference generated almost 1000 PLN of unnecessary monthly cost, which in no way translated into employee comfort.
We negotiated a transition to a settlement system according to real consumption (open book). The owner agreed on the condition that the IT company would sign a contract for another 26 months. For the client, this was great news because they weren't planning on moving anyway. Thanks to this simple maneuver, the company keeps an amount in its pocket every month that is enough to pay for the coffee and fruit subscription for the entire 12-person team.
Face-to-face negotiations over coffee in Kazimierz
Most property owners in Krakow are not heartless investment funds, but specific people who value stability. We prepared a market report for our client. In it, we showed 4 other available offices within a 600-meter radius that had lower base rates. This was our argument number three. We didn't want to threaten the owner with a contract termination, but we showed them a real alternative. A vacancy means a loss of about 11,000 PLN per month for them, including the costs of maintaining an empty premises.
We met in one of the cafes in Kazimierz to finalize the arrangements. I honestly admit it wasn't easy. The owner argued that the roof renovation costs last year were huge. We, however, stuck to the version that the office must earn its keep, not pay for structural renovations that are the owner's responsibility. Ultimately, we settled on a 4.7% base rent reduction in exchange for the tenant modernizing the lighting to LED, which we were planning anyway.
The sum of all these actions – correct measurement, realistic utility charges, and a small base rate reduction – gave exactly 3824 PLN of monthly savings. These are not virtual points; this is real cash that stopped flowing out of the company account. I was proud of this result because it shows that professional advice pays off in the first quarter of office use. We don't fluff; we check every invoice and every centimeter of the wall.
A vacancy means a loss of about 11,000 PLN per month for the owner.
