When to open an offshore office, and when to stay remote

Most New Zealand tech firms that expand offshore open their first office about a year too early, and pay for the privilege. The decision tends to get made on feel - a handful of wins in a market, a sense that you ought to "have a presence" there - rather than on what an office actually does for the business. Premises and people are a real commitment with a real cost to unwind. The right default is to stay remote until something specific forces your hand.

First, this is not the legal question

Opening an office and setting up a local company are two different decisions that get tangled together. You can register a local entity and never rent a square metre, and you can take a desk in a shared space with no entity at all. I have written separately about when a market forces you into a legal wrapper. This is the other thing entirely: a physical place, and people who come to it.

What an office actually buys you

An office does three honest things. It gives a growing local team somewhere to work together. It puts a credible local address on your website, which still matters to some enterprise and government buyers. And it signals commitment to a market - to customers, and to the people you are trying to hire there.

The catch is that for most New Zealand firms in their first year offshore, the "local team" is one or two people delivering to customers across a time zone. None of those three things needs a lease. A coworking membership gives them somewhere to work. A registered address gives you the credibility. And the commitment signal, this early, is mostly for your own comfort rather than anyone else's benefit.

What it costs when the market stalls

The number that should drive this decision is not the monthly rent. It is the cost of getting out. A flexible desk in Sydney runs about A$840 a month and you can hand it back with a month's notice. A conventional lease is a different animal: a modest 3,000 square foot office in Singapore's CBD works out at roughly SGD 1.2 million over three years, and you carry that whether the market works out or not.

The gap between a desk you can leave in a month and a lease you owe for three years is the whole decision. New Zealand tech firms earn NZ$15.31 billion a year in export revenue, and almost none of it needed an offshore office to earn. Until a market has proven it can carry the cost, the smaller commitment is not the timid choice. It is the correct one.

So when do you actually need one?

Three signals tell you the desk has stopped being enough. The first is team size: once you have four or five people in a market who need to work alongside each other every day, remote coordination starts costing you more than rent would. The second is the buyer - in some markets and some sectors a local office is a genuine purchasing signal rather than a vanity one, and you will hear it in the deals you are losing. The third is the work itself: a lab, a showroom, regulated on-site delivery that simply cannot be run from a spare bedroom.

If none of those is true, you do not have an office problem. You have a desk-and-address problem, and it is a far cheaper one to solve.

Climb the ladder one rung at a time

There is a sensible order to this. A registered or virtual address first, then a coworking membership, then dedicated serviced desks, and only then your own lease. Each step up adds cost and commitment, and each one is harder to reverse than the last. Move up a rung only when the rung you are standing on is the thing actually holding the business back, not when the next one simply feels like progress.

And if you do sign a lease, plan the exit before you plan the fit-out. Know the notice period, the make-good obligations, and hardest of all, what happens to the people if you have to close it. The fortnight after you decide to leave a market is where that cost really lands, and it is mostly about staff, not property. Keeping the customers you win in that market is its own job, and a lease does not do it for you.

So before you sign anything, ask the plain version of the question: if this market went quiet in six months, what would this office cost you to walk away from - and could a desk and an address have done the same job?

Sources. A flexible office desk in Sydney costing about A$840 a month: Office Hub, 2025 Price Guide for Flexible Office Spaces in Sydney. A conventional 3,000 square foot office in Singapore's CBD costing roughly SGD 1.2 million over three years, based on Grade A CBD rent of SGD 11.13 per square foot a month: The Executive Centre analysis, citing Cushman & Wakefield Q3 2025 figures. New Zealand tech firms earning NZ$15.31 billion in export revenue in FY2025: Technology Investment Network, 2025 TIN Report. The signals that you need an office, the order to add space in, and the cost of unwinding one draw on my own experience helping New Zealand tech firms expand offshore, not a single study.

Nick Burns is a fractional CRO for New Zealand B2B tech companies, at home and expanding internationally. He co-founded Emendo and sold it to McKesson, then the 14th-largest company on the Fortune 500, and has since helped 60+ tech companies grow sales.