Mid-December last year one of my companies (China Bay) received a notice from the landlord that we would have to vacate the building. The reason was that our office villa would be torn down to make way for a skyscraper. We would have exactly one month to find a new place and to move out. Well, that’s a bit short, and even if we had wanted to move we would not have been able to do so within a month. Finding a new place and renovating it already takes at least 2-3 months. So after some serious negotiations we could stay longer, because the rental contract that we signed does not allow them to just kick us out like this.

There were some more tenants in our building (we only rented the ground floor), and all have left in the meantime, so we have the whole place to ourselves now. Probably in order to motivate us to hurry up to find a new place, the developer put some nice red banners on the outside of our office (see picture). The message of the banners is that we should ‘support the relocation’. China Bay will probably have to find a new place soon, it’s a pity because the location is great and we spent quite some money on decorating the building on the inside.

At the moment Spill Group Asia also has its office in this building (renting some space from China Bay), but for this business I already found a new place. We will move to an office in the Jiaotong University Science Park (an incubator center). A great place for an online gaming start-up, surrounded by all other Chinese internet and software start-ups. I look forward to moving there, likely we can move in by April 1.