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🎉 Coworking celebrations.
🇩🇪 Berlin Impact Report shared.
Huge congrats to the Impact Hub Berlin team for making, measuring, and then sharing, how they supported 350 organizations, provided 5,000 hours of support and more.
📰 Coworking updates.
🏢 On the rise of ‘brandlords’.
Zoe Ellis-Moore covers the growing trend of landlords & commercial property investment groups taking a DIY approach to running their own flexspace brands.
Noted examples from the UK market are Shaftesbury’s Assemble, British Land’s Storey, Landsec’s Myo, Great Portland Estates’ £900M ($1.24B) into flex offerings and L&G‘s pledge to double their Capsule brand to 55 spaces.
🥛 On the growth of neighborhood (working) clubhouses.
Conor Sen shares how he’s optimistic about the hybrid workplace options that exist ‘somewhere between a coffee shop and coworking space’.
The Bloomberg Opinion piece touches on a few growing trends we’ve been following and discussing in here in TWIC recently – namely, the growth in demand for suburban (commute-free) workspaces, and the shift towards more lounge-like workspaces designed for a range of different ways people work.
😖 Opportunity: 50% of remote workers say WFH is too painful.
When CraftJack interviewed 1,520 Americans who worked from home, 45% said they regularly work from the sofa and 38% regularly work from their beds. Shockingly 50% say that the ‘pain and discomfort of working from home’ is pushing them back towards offices, even after they spent on average $268 each on improving their remote work setups.
There’s a huge opportunity here for coworking spaces to invite these unhappy WFH-ers into more comfortable and nearby workspace communities.
👋 3 top ways coworking supports remote workers.
The Good Coworking team share 3 reasons why remote workers thrive in coworking spaces, along with a quote from a remote working member.
A great benefits-promoting marketing piece, and one I wouldn’t be surprised being remixed by other community-centric workspace providers.
📜 Remote work marketing material… from the 1980’s.
Denise Brouder shares a screenshot from Hal Josephson‘s marketing material for “tele” work and meetings from back in the 80s.
It’s fascinating to look back and see how much has changed, as well as how much hasn’t changed, yet.
💬 What does flex look like in the mid-markets?
In this Q&A post, Melanie Jones discusses flex workspaces in mid-market (or mid-tier) cities with David Heyburn and Jessica Renfrew from Edison Spaces.
They look into why (and how) opportunities are spotted for flex space in these regions, the structure of the deals, and why they lean heavily on private offices over open-plan coworking space.
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💻 Coworking technology.
🗺 Why GMB is so important for local businesses (and workspaces).
John Mueller, a Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, shares why Google My Business listings are so important for showing up in ‘near me’ and other local search results.
🦘 Google My Business auto-updater for flex space added.
Syncaroo first GMB Automation has been added into the private beta. This workflow automation starts small, first automatically keeping Opening Hours in-sync, but lays the foundation for even more auto-syncing of information and media onto these important marketing outposts.
🖱 Flex space provider offers ‘design your office’ tool.
The folks over Orega shared a new addition to their website, that allows potential customers the ability to visually plan out their office needs to calculate just how much space they’ll need.
I’ve definitely seen a number of moves towards floor mapping and branded DIY tools, so expect to see this adopted by more spaces and brokerages.
📲 Germany-based booking app adds team memberships.
Christoph Fahle shares how businesses went from discussing hybrid work in Clubhouse, to bringing in desk booking technology, and into why One Coworking has added centrally-managed team memberships with multi-location access.
📊 Coworking data.
📈 Q2 market data on flex demand, pricing and more.
Ben Wright returns with another quarter’s data via the Upsuite network.
Numbers that caught my eye were the rebound in demand (almost everywhere) with over 40% increase from Q1 2021 and nearly 10% higher that pre-pandemic Q1 2020 numbers.
Also with higher vacancies (of seats and space) the average asking price per seat dipped down lower to $374.85 from a high of $410.27 in Q1/20.
🥊 The disconnect between employers and employees runs deep.
McKinsey & Co share why it’s time for business leaders to get real about hybrid workspace strategies, and a spike in attrition and disengagement may be imminent.
They then dive into the data from interviews with both employers and employees. A fascinating longer read or 16 min listen.
🎍 What the future of office design may look and feel like.
work.life & Knight Frank interviewed almost 400 global business leaders to understand how they’re adapting their real estate strategies.
Using the gathered opinions, they predicted what the future of office design may look like in this pretty (and pretty interesting) report.
🤝 Coworking deals.
💰 UK Proptech Investor announces two new strategic backers.
Pi Labs announced that Moorfield Group and Elkstone are the newest limited partners of their 3rd proptech investment fund.
Proptech funding is heating up, as technology continues to enable change in how we find, interact, and exchange property.
💻 Freelancing management & space booking platforms partner up.
Indy & Upflex announced a partnership that could bring a whole raft of independent workers into workspaces on the platform, in search of safe workspaces and community.
🇮🇪 Partnership signed to grow network to 350 hybrid workspaces.
The Irish Times reports on this deal between property company NoCo and the National Association of Community Enterprise Centers.
The deal gives members of NoCo’s 100 locations access to more than 250 Enterprise Ireland-supported hubs.
🇯🇵 Singaporean operator launches in Tokyo through agreement.
Cecilia Amador de San José shares the news about JustCo launching their first location in Japan, through an agreement with Tokyu Corporation.
KONG Wan Sing, Founder and CEO of JustCo notes that recent surveys have found that over 20% of companies in Japan are interested in leveraging flex workspaces moving forward.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Caleb Parker returns with Season 5 of his podcast, chatting with Jonathan Pearce from Ivanhoé Cambridge and Dave Cairns from CBRE about the pandemic’s impact on the office market.
In a short snippet of a masterclass, Amit Ramani from Awfis shares how proptech can, and will, still shape the commercial real estate sector.
Jamie Russo and Jerry Alexander discuss purchasing commercial property, and running flex spaces from within them.
Daan van Rossum shares (and summaries) a conversation between Ken Biberaj from Savills NA and Michele Schneider from Salesforce.
📆 Coworking events.
🗽 GCUC North America in September in NYC
The GCUC team shared that they’ll be hosting a 3-day in-person and virtual hybrid event from September 27th to 29th.
Space operators signed up for included can get 15% off tickets, and readers of this newsletter can reply directly to me to get the discount too.
Discover or share coworking-related events here.
💼 Coworking jobs.
Find or post coworking jobs for free here.