TL;DR
- The lease end date is the real deadline and it does not move. Everything else in this process is scheduled backwards from it, and companies that start eight weeks out run out of time in the last fortnight.
- Office equipment was never on the asset register in the way laptops were. Monitors, docks, chairs and meeting room kit were bought as fit-out rather than as assigned devices, so there is usually no record of what is in the building.
- Sort before you move anything. Five categories, and each one has a different destination. Moving first and sorting later means paying to store things you were going to throw away.
- A third of your people will not want the monitor. Plan for refusals rather than treating them as exceptions, because the refusal rate decides how much storage you need.
- Storage defaults badly. Nobody decides to pay for a unit for three years, but that is what happens when the decision is deferred past the lease date.
- Shipping two hundred monitors to two hundred home addresses is a different operation from shipping two hundred laptops, and the cost per unit is worse, not better.
The week the building emptied and the inventory appeared
A 180-person company gave up its office on a six-week notice. The decision was financial and it was the right one. What nobody had modelled was that the building contained roughly nine hundred items of equipment that had never appeared on any register, because they had been bought as part of a fit-out in two tranches four years apart.
Two hundred and twenty monitors. A hundred and ninety docks. Chairs, desks, three meeting room systems, a server cabinet containing things nobody could identify, a cupboard of cables, and eleven laptops that turned out to belong to people who had left between eighteen months and three years earlier.
The laptops were the easy part. The company had a register for those and it was approximately right. Everything else was a question nobody owned, and the person who ended up owning it was the office manager, who had four weeks to decide the fate of nine hundred objects while also handling the lease exit.
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What made it expensive was not the volume. It was that the sorting happened after the moving. Everything went into storage because storage was the decision that did not require a decision, and eighteen months later the company was still paying for a unit containing monitors that had been obsolete when they went in.
When this is not the problem you have
You are closing a desk cluster, not an office. Twenty people giving up a shared floor in a serviced building is a logistics task for an afternoon. The approach below is for a building with its own fit-out and a lease with an exit condition.
Everything in the building is leased and the lessor takes it back. If your furniture and your IT equipment are both on operating leases with return clauses, your job is to schedule the collections and confirm the condition requirements. That is a real project but it is a different one, and most of the decisions below have been made for you.
You are moving to a smaller office, not to nothing. A move has a destination, which means the sorting question is what comes with you rather than what happens to the surplus. The overlap with this article is the surplus, which is usually about a third of what you are moving out.
The office was never equipped. Some companies that went remote early never furnished a space properly, and the building contains a coffee machine and some folding tables. Give it away and move on.
The inventory that was never on the register
Ask most companies for a list of company equipment and you get the laptop register. It will be roughly accurate because laptops are assigned to named people and that assignment is recorded when somebody joins.
Office equipment was bought differently. It arrived as a fit-out, in bulk, charged to a project rather than to a person, and it was never assigned to anybody because it belonged to the room. Nobody records that meeting room two has a display and a conferencing unit, because until the building closes there is no reason to.
This produces a specific and avoidable problem. You cannot plan the exit without knowing what is in the building, and finding out takes a physical count that somebody has to do by walking around with a clipboard. Companies routinely underestimate this and schedule the count for the week they are also packing.
Do the count first and do it early. One person, two days for a floor, recording four things per item: what it is, roughly how old, what condition, and whether it is worth anything. You are not building an asset register. You are building a sorting list, and the fourth column is the one that drives every decision after it.
The five categories, and where each one goes
Everything in the building falls into one of five groups. Sorting into these before anything moves is the single decision that keeps the cost down.
| Category | Typical contents | Destination | Decide by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assigned and in use | Laptops with named holders | Stays with the person, nothing to do | Already decided |
| Reissuable | Recent monitors, docks, keyboards, headsets | Home addresses or storage for future joiners | Week 2 |
| Resaleable but not reissuable | Older machines, surplus displays, furniture | Resale channel or buyback | Week 2 |
| Worthless but disposable | Obsolete displays, dead peripherals, cables | Recycling, with data-bearing items separated | Week 3 |
| Data-bearing | Anything with storage, including the ones you forgot | Certified wipe or destruction before anything else | Week 1 |
The last row matters more than its size suggests. A server cabinet, an old network-attached drive, a printer with a hard disk and a stack of retired laptops are all data-bearing, and they tend to be in the category nobody is thinking about while they concentrate on the monitors. Separate them in week one, before the building gets chaotic, because the one thing you cannot do is discover a drive in a skip afterwards.
Note also that reissuable and resaleable are different categories with different timelines. A monitor that a new joiner will want in four months is worth storing. A monitor that nobody will want is worth selling now while it still has residual value, and its value falls faster in a storage unit than on a desk.
The lease date is the deadline and it does not negotiate
Everything else in this process is scheduled backwards from a date in a contract. That date comes with an exit condition, which typically requires the space returned in a specified state, and the condition is the thing that produces the last-minute panic.
Read the exit clause in week one, not week five. The three things to establish are what condition the space has to be in, whether fit-out you installed has to be removed, and whether anything you leave becomes a liability rather than a gift. Companies regularly assume that leaving the desks behind is a kindness and discover it is a chargeable removal.
Then work backwards. Collections need booking, and the companies that collect bulk IT equipment are not always available in the week you want them. Resale takes longer than it should because quotes are produced per lot and the lot has to be described. Recycling is usually the quickest to arrange and the easiest to leave too late.
A workable backward schedule from a six-week notice looks like this.
| Week | What happens | Why this order |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Physical count. Read the exit clause. Separate data-bearing items | Everything else depends on knowing what you have |
| 2 | Sort into five categories. Get resale and recycling quotes | Quotes take a week to come back; start before you need them |
| 3 | Confirm who wants what. Book collections | Refusals change the storage requirement, so ask before you book |
| 4 | Ship to home addresses. Wipe and remove data-bearing items | The bulk of the movement, and it needs the full week |
| 5 | Resale collection. Recycling collection. Storage intake | What is left after people have taken what they want |
| 6 | Exit condition work. Final walk. Handover | The clause, not your convenience, decides what this involves |
Six weeks is tight and it is a common notice period. Eight is comfortable. Four means something gets skipped, and what gets skipped is usually the resale, because it is the only step with no hard deadline attached.
Shipping to home addresses is not the same operation
The instinct is that you already ship laptops to people, so shipping monitors is the same job at a larger size. It is not, and the differences all cost money.
A monitor is bulky, light for its volume and fragile in a specific way, which puts it in a worse shipping band than a laptop and makes it more likely to arrive damaged. Original packaging is long gone for equipment that has been on a desk for three years, so each one needs packing, and packing a monitor properly takes materials and about ten minutes of somebody's time.
Then there is the destination problem. Laptop shipments go to new joiners one at a time, usually to an address somebody has just confirmed. An office closure means sending to every current address at once, and a proportion of your address data is wrong. Expect failures, and expect them to cluster in the people who moved recently and never updated anything.
Three practical decisions reduce the cost. Ask before you ship, because the refusal rate is high enough to change the plan. Ship in one batch per person, since sending a monitor on Tuesday and a dock on Thursday doubles the handling for no benefit. And decide the damage policy before the first breakage, because the first one arrives within days and an undecided policy produces an argument with somebody who did not ask for the monitor in the first place.
The people who say no, and planning for them
A meaningful share of your people will not want the equipment. Not a handful. Enough to change your storage decision.
The reasons are consistent and reasonable. They do not have the desk space. They already bought their own monitor when the company went remote. They live in a flat where a thirty-inch display is a problem rather than a benefit. They are leaving in two months and do not want to be the person holding company property. Or they simply do not want to be responsible for an object they did not choose.
Ask the question properly. A message saying equipment is available produces a low response and an ambiguous result. A message that says what specific item is allocated to them, when it would arrive, and asks them to confirm or decline by a date produces a usable answer. Make declining easy and explicitly fine, because the alternative is people accepting things they do not want, which converts a storage problem into a retrieval problem two years later.
Then hold the number. Whatever proportion declines, that is your surplus, and the surplus is what the resale and storage decisions are actually about. Companies that plan on everyone accepting end up with a storage unit, because the surplus arrives as a surprise in week five when there is no time to arrange anything else.
Storage is the decision that gets made by not deciding
Nobody sits down and decides to pay for a storage unit for three years. What happens is that week five arrives, there is a pile of equipment with no agreed destination, the van is booked, and storage is the only option that does not require a decision today.
That is how a six-week project becomes a recurring monthly cost that nobody owns and nobody reviews. The equipment in it depreciates while being stored, so the asset you are paying to keep is worth less every month, and the point at which somebody finally opens the unit is usually the point at which the contents are worth nothing at all.
Storage is a good decision in exactly one situation, which is when you have a known future need and a date. If you are hiring thirty people next quarter and you have thirty monitors, storing them until then is obviously correct. If the reason is that you might need them, you are paying rent on a maybe.
So make the storage decision explicitly, in week three, with a quantity and an end date attached. Write down what is being stored, why, who reviews it and when. A storage decision with a review date is a plan. A storage decision without one is a subscription.
What to do with what nobody wants
Four channels, in descending order of what you recover.
Buyback. Specialist buyers take bulk IT equipment, quote per lot and collect. The quote depends on model, age and condition, and it will be lower than you hoped. The advantage is that it is one transaction with one party, and for volumes in the hundreds that convenience is worth real money.
Resale to your own staff. Popular, straightforward and better for the equipment, since somebody who bought a monitor at a fair price will look after it. Set one price per item type rather than negotiating, do it in one window, and be clear that the item is sold as seen with no support attached.
Donation. Schools, charities and community organisations will take working equipment, and some will collect. Check whether they want what you have before assuming, because a charity with no use for twenty docks is being given a disposal problem. Data-bearing items need wiping first regardless of who receives them.
Recycling. The destination for anything with no residual value. Use a provider that handles data-bearing equipment properly and gives you documentation, because the documentation is the only evidence you will have later that the drives were dealt with.
The common mistake is treating these as a sequence rather than a sort. Companies try buyback, wait for a quote, then try donation, then run out of time and recycle everything. Decide the channel per category in week two and run them in parallel.
How to describe a lot so the quote comes back usable
The schedule above says to get resale and recycling quotes in week two. Here is what a quote request has to contain, because a vague description produces either a lowball number or a long exchange of questions you do not have time for.
Count by model, not by type. Forty monitors is not a lot anybody can price. Forty units across three models, with the model names and the approximate purchase years, is. If you cannot identify the model, the label on the back has it, and the fifteen minutes it takes to photograph forty labels converts a worthless description into a priceable one.
State the condition honestly, in bands. Working and cosmetically good, working with marks, working with a fault, not working. Buyers price on condition and they inspect on collection, so an optimistic description produces a revised offer on the day when you have no alternative and no time. The revised offer is always worse than the honest quote would have been.
Say what is included. A monitor with its stand and cable is worth meaningfully more than a bare panel, and a dock without its power supply is worth close to nothing. These details change the number enough that leaving them out makes quotes incomparable between vendors.
Give the collection constraints up front. Floor, lift access, loading restrictions, the dates the building is accessible and whether there is anyone to supervise. Access problems are the most common reason a collection gets repriced on arrival, and they are entirely knowable in advance.
Ask for the quote to separate data-bearing items. You want those priced and documented differently even if the same company takes them, because the paperwork you need for them is different from the paperwork you need for a desk.
Send the same description to three buyers. The spread between quotes in this market is wide, wider than most people expect, and the only way to see it is to make the three numbers comparable.
The communications problem, which lands worse than you expect
An office closure is not a neutral event for the people in it, and the equipment message arrives in the middle of that. Companies that treat it as a logistics notice get a reaction they did not plan for.
The sequence that works is to separate the two messages. The closure decision and its reasons come first, from whoever is accountable for it, with space for the reaction. The equipment message comes afterwards as a practical note, and it should read as housekeeping rather than as the company's main concern. Sending them together reads as though the furniture mattered as much as the jobs, which is rarely the intent and frequently the effect.
When the equipment message does go, make it specific and make it short. Name the item allocated to that person, give the date it would arrive, give a deadline to confirm or decline, and say explicitly that declining is fine and carries no implication. Vague messages about equipment being available generate a wave of individual questions that somebody then answers two hundred times.
Two things are worth stating in the message that people will otherwise ask. What happens if something arrives damaged, and whether accepting an item makes them responsible for returning it when they eventually leave. The second one is the real question behind most refusals, and answering it up front raises the acceptance rate more than any amount of encouragement.
And give one named person to reply to. An inbox nobody owns produces a backlog in exactly the week you have the least capacity for it.
Closing an office in a country where you keep people
This is the version that catches companies out, because it looks like a smaller problem than closing a head office and is frequently a larger one.
You close a site in a market where you still employ people who will now work from home. The equipment does not need to leave the country, which sounds simpler. What has changed is that you no longer have premises in that country, and a surprising amount of your logistics assumed you did. The office was the delivery address, the holding location, the place a courier could leave something and the place a leaver could drop a laptop. All of that goes at once.
Three consequences follow. You need a receiving address in that market and a home address is not always a good one, particularly for anything that needs signature, inspection or temporary holding. Retrieval gets materially harder, because collecting from twelve home addresses in a country with no company presence is a different operation from twelve people walking into reception. And anything you need to hold now needs somewhere to be held, which is the point at which companies discover that local storage with no local staff is harder to arrange than they assumed.
The decision this forces is whether that market needs a local arrangement or whether equipment should leave it entirely. Shipping equipment out of a country you still employ people in is usually wrong, since you will be shipping it back in when you hire there again, and the customs cost of each crossing is real. Arranging in-country holding or a local partner is usually right if you intend to keep hiring there.
What is actually wrong is deferring the decision, because the default when nobody decides is that equipment stays in people's homes indefinitely with no record of where it is. That is not a storage strategy. It is a retrieval problem you have agreed to have later, in a country where you have no presence to retrieve it with.
The asset register problem this exposes
An office closure is usually the moment a company discovers its asset register was describing something narrower than it thought.
The register covered assigned devices. It did not cover room equipment, it did not cover the surplus in the cupboard, and it had no entry for the eleven laptops belonging to people who left years ago. That is not negligence. It is what happens when a register is built from an onboarding process, because an onboarding process only ever sees the things that get assigned to joiners.
The useful thing is that the closure produces an accurate count as a by-product. You walked around the building and wrote down what was there. That list is better than the register you had, and the sensible thing is to merge it rather than discard it once the building is empty.
If you are going to do that, decide early how the surviving equipment gets recorded, because the moment it is distributed to two hundred home addresses it becomes much harder to track than it was when it was all in one room. Items shipped to people should be assigned to those people in whatever system you use, at the point of shipping, not afterwards from a delivery report.
The questions that follow the equipment into people's homes
Distributing an office means converting equipment that sat in an insured building under a facilities policy into equipment sitting in two hundred homes. Several questions change at that moment and most companies answer them after the first incident rather than before.
Insurance is the obvious one and the answer is specific to your cover, so the useful move is to ask your broker rather than to assume either way. The question to put to them is narrow: whether company-owned equipment at an employee's home address is covered under existing policies, and if so up to what value and under what conditions. Companies routinely discover that contents cover attached to a building does not follow the contents out of it, and the time to discover that is before two hundred monitors leave.
The second question is what happens on damage, and it needs a written answer before the first breakage. Who pays when something arrives broken, when it breaks in normal use a year later, and when it is damaged by something clearly avoidable. These are different situations and a single policy that treats them identically will be applied unevenly in practice. Whatever you decide, the thing that prevents arguments is that the answer existed before the incident rather than being constructed in response to it.
Third is the return expectation, which is the question people are really asking when they hesitate to accept a monitor. Make it explicit. Say whether the item is expected back when they leave, whether it is theirs to keep, and if it is expected back, who arranges and pays for that. An unstated return expectation produces two bad outcomes: people decline equipment they would have taken, and the ones who accept it treat it as a gift and are surprised later.
Fourth, and least considered, is what this does to your leaver process. Every item you distribute becomes an item somebody has to retrieve eventually, and a closure can double or triple the number of objects attached to each departure. A leaver process built around returning one laptop does not automatically extend to returning a laptop, a monitor, a dock and a chair, and the step that usually breaks is the one where somebody has to pack and ship something bulky at the point they are least motivated to help.
None of this argues against distributing the equipment. It argues for deciding these four things in week three, while you are asking people whether they want the items, rather than in month four when the first one breaks.
The options for handling it, and where each struggles
Doing it yourself with a removals firm. Cheapest on paper and entirely workable for a single site. A removals company moves objects; it does not sort, wipe, resell or track. You supply all of the decisions and most of the labour. It struggles when the volume is large enough that the sorting alone consumes somebody's month.
An ITAD provider. Specialists in disposal and data destruction who will collect in bulk and provide documentation. The right answer for the data-bearing and worthless categories, and they often buy back the resaleable ones. They struggle on the reissuable category, because their model is removal rather than redistribution, and you may find yourself selling monitors you will want to buy again in six months.
An equipment platform. Vendors in this category handle procurement, delivery and retrieval, and some will take on a closure as a project. The attraction is that the reissuable equipment stays in a system rather than being dispersed. They struggle on furniture and non-IT items, which no equipment platform wants, so you still need a removals firm for the desks.
RemoAsset, which is our own product and that is disclosure rather than a footnote, covers procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries and publishes a Subscription tier from $1,499 a year. For a closure specifically, the relevant part is holding reissuable equipment and sending it back out to future joiners rather than dispersing it. Three limits are worth stating plainly because a closure plan built on a wrong assumption is expensive: it enrols devices but is not an MDM in its own right; it wipes devices but is not a certified ITAD, so if your closure needs formal destruction certificates for the data-bearing category that is a separate arrangement; and coverage and lead times vary by market, so a closure in a market where lead times are long needs more notice than one in a major hub.
The decision table
| Situation | Scale | Setup | Primary Pain | Recommended Starting Point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Serviced office, short notice | Under 40 people | Nothing owned beyond laptops | Sorting time, not cost | Count, ask, ship. No vendor needed |
| Own fit-out, going fully remote | 50 to 200 | Laptops on a register, nothing else | Volume of unregistered equipment | Count in week one, sort into five categories |
| Downsizing to a smaller space | 100 to 400 | Partial register, a move already planned | Deciding what travels | Sort the surplus separately from the move |
| Closing one site of several | Any | Register exists, other sites need kit | Redistribution, not disposal | Equipment platform or internal transfer |
| Data-heavy environment | Any | Servers, NAS, printers with storage | Evidence of destruction | ITAD provider with documentation, week one |
| Lease exit with removal clause | Any | Fit-out you installed | A chargeable condition you discovered late | Read the clause first, then plan everything else |
What getting this wrong actually costs
The visible cost is the storage unit, and it is the one people cite afterwards. A unit holding depreciating equipment for two years is a genuine waste and it is also the smallest of the three costs here.
The second is the resale value you did not capture. Equipment has a residual value curve that falls steadily, and the difference between selling monitors in the month you close and selling them eighteen months later is most of what they were worth. That value is not recoverable later; it is simply gone, and it is usually larger than the storage bill that drew attention to it.
The third is the one nobody puts a number on, which is the data-bearing equipment that went somewhere undocumented. A drive in a skip is not a cost until it is, and then it is a category of problem rather than an amount. The reason week one in the schedule above is the data separation is that this is the only one of the three that cannot be fixed by spending money afterwards.
So the question worth asking in week one is not how much the exit will cost. It is which of these three you are most likely to get wrong given who is actually doing the work and how much time they have.
When the office closure becomes an equipment operation
For most companies a closure is a one-off, handled by whoever has capacity, and that is a reasonable way to treat an event that happens once.
It stops being reasonable in two situations. The first is a company closing several sites over a year, where the same decisions get made repeatedly by different people with no shared process and the results vary enormously. The second is a company that closes its office and then continues hiring, which converts a one-off disposal into an ongoing distribution problem that the closure was the start of rather than the end.
In both cases the thing to carry forward is the sorting list, not the storage unit. You produced an accurate count of what the company owns, probably for the first time. The companies that come out of a closure in better shape than they went in are the ones that treated that list as the start of a register rather than as paperwork for a project that has finished.
Frequently asked questions
How long before the lease ends should we start?
Eight weeks is comfortable and six is workable. The constraint is not the physical move, which is fast, but the quotes and bookings, which are slow and sequential. Resale and recycling providers typically take a week to return a quote on a described lot, and bulk collections need booking well in advance because the companies that do them have limited capacity. Starting at four weeks means the resale step gets dropped, since it is the only part of the process with no external deadline forcing it, and dropping it is usually the most expensive decision in the whole exit.
Who should own this internally?
Whoever owns the lease exit, with IT owning the data-bearing category specifically. The mistake is splitting it by object type, so that IT handles the computers and facilities handles the furniture, because the categories that matter cut across that line. A printer is facilities equipment with a hard disk in it. Ownership should follow the deadline, and the deadline is the lease, so the person managing the lease exit should be accountable for the whole inventory with IT accountable for one category within it.
Should we ship monitors to people at all?
Ask them first and let the answer decide. The shipping cost per monitor is poor relative to its residual value, so for older displays the arithmetic often favours selling or recycling locally rather than paying to distribute them. For recent equipment that people actively want, shipping is clearly worth it. The reason to ask rather than calculate is that the refusal rate varies enormously between companies depending on how long people have been remote and what they already own, and your own refusal rate is the only figure that tells you which case you are in.
What do we do with equipment belonging to people who already left?
Treat it as surplus and wipe it before anything else happens to it. Finding devices belonging to former employees during a closure count is extremely common, because a leaver returning equipment to the office created no record and the item simply stayed where it was put. Do not try to reconcile it against historical records; the records do not exist. Add the items to the count, put the data-bearing ones in the week-one category, and note the discovery as evidence for why the register needs to cover more than assigned devices.
Is it cheaper to store equipment or to buy again later?
Usually cheaper to sell now and buy later, which surprises people. Storage is a monthly cost against an asset that is depreciating, so you are paying to hold something that is losing value, and the combined effect over two years commonly exceeds the replacement cost of equipment that will by then be two generations old. The exception is a known need with a date attached, such as a confirmed hiring plan next quarter, where storage for a short defined period against a specific requirement is straightforwardly the right answer.
How do we handle data-bearing equipment we cannot identify?
Treat anything you cannot positively identify as data-bearing and route it to the same process as the drives you do recognise. Closure counts routinely turn up cabinets and boxes whose contents nobody can explain, and the cost of putting an unidentified device through a certified destruction process is small compared with the cost of discovering later that it held something. Ask your provider to document what they received rather than what you declared, so the record reflects the physical items rather than your inventory of them.
Does an equipment platform help with an office closure?
Partly, and the honest answer depends on which category dominates your building. Platforms are built for assigned devices moving to and from individuals, so they help most with the reissuable category, where the alternative is dispersing equipment you will want back. They do not want your furniture, and most are not certified for formal data destruction, so a closure with a lot of non-IT equipment or a lot of data-bearing hardware still needs a removals firm and an ITAD provider alongside. Using one for the reissuable third and specialists for the rest is the common shape.
What should we keep from this process afterwards?
The count, converted into a register that covers more than assigned devices. The physical walk you did produces a more accurate picture of company equipment than most registers contain, and the moment after a closure is the only time that picture is both complete and current. Record what survived, who it went to and when, at the point of shipping rather than reconstructing it later from delivery confirmations. Companies that do this come out of a closure with better asset data than they had before it, which is a genuinely unusual outcome for a project that started as a cost-cutting exercise.
Where this leaves you
A closure is a sorting problem with a fixed deadline, and almost every expensive outcome traces back to sorting late.
Count in week one and read the exit clause the same week. Separate the data-bearing items before anything else moves. Sort into five categories before booking a single collection, ask people what they actually want rather than assuming, and make the storage decision explicitly with a quantity and an end date rather than letting it happen because week five arrived.
Then keep the list. It is the most accurate inventory the company has ever had and it will be out of date within a month if nobody decides to maintain it.
If you take one thing from this into the next closure, make it the week-one count. Almost every expensive decision described above traces back to not knowing what was in the building until it was too late to do anything but move it. The count is two days of unglamorous work by one person with a clipboard, it produces the only document that the rest of the process depends on, and it is consistently the step that gets compressed when the schedule tightens. Protect it the way you would protect the lease date, because in practice it governs just as much of the outcome.
