ThisWeekIn Coworking

Week 36, 2021

We see movement in rural coworking, the booking platform race heating up, a new financial planning resource, a growing market opportunity, an OG bankruptcy, and see a spike in corp flex demand. 

🎉 Coworking celebrations.

🍾 Mindspace in Mainhattan turns 3!

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📰 Coworking updates.

🧮 How to build a financial model for a coworking space.

Jamie Dundas penned a blog post for Coworking Resources (aka Kisi) on how landlords and entrepreneurs can build and assess a financial model for any potential coworking space project.

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🕒 The 15 min city doesn’t “just work” everywhere.

In her recent newsletter, Georgie Chennells highlights a few reason why the notion of a 15 min (mostly walkable) city wouldn’t be possible for most in Johannesburg.

The main point is not that coworking and flex workspace wouldn’t work in the country, they do and are thriving, but that blindly following international trends won’t work. They need to be observed, discussed and applied within/alongside local factors.

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💻 Opportunity: remote programmers are here to stay.

Phil Kirschner shares an interesting graph that tracks programming jobs on the monthly Hacker News “Who’s Hiring” thread comparing those that were ‘onsite’ vs ‘remote’. Whilst programming jobs have been remote for a while, the pandemic did shift remote roles into the clear majority.

So my question to all off you, is what are you doing to make your workspaces programmer-friendly to capture this opportunity? Vertical screens anyone?

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😖 Challenging the narrative of non-urban productivity cost.

Lily Bruns challenges Viviane Callier‘s article in Wired around the productivity cost (or loss) for those who are leaving the cities (or the traditional offices) behind.

The counter-argument is that coworking spaces, and other 3rd places, not only supplement any productivity cost, but may actually return a surplus of rewards and benefits. (Thanks to Rowena Hennigan for highlighting this conversation.)

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🦄 Traditional offices will become the exception says AUS unicorn.

Canva has unveiled a new flexible work model that will allow teams to determine how often employees will need to work from the office. This comes after internal surveys showed 81% of its employees want to continue working flexibly after current lockdowns were relaxed.

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👩‍💻 Are women-owned spaces faring worse than others?

Emma Ascott looks at how, and where, female-owned coworking spaces are being forced to close or be sold off.

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🇩🇪 14 rural coworking spaces host ‘open-door day’.

14 spaces in Schleswig-Holstein (the north-most state in Germany) are coordinating to host a state-wide open day for locals to try out suburban coworking on September 18th. Another great example of collaborative efforts to promote the value and benefits of coworking.

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⏱ In under 60s: What happened to all the former Knotel spaces?

Gabe Marans from Savills is back with another (his 66th) episode of his ’60 Seconds with Gabe’ vlog. In it he shares what happened with Knotel‘s spaces and 2 other NYC real estate questions.

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💻 Coworking technology.

🇱🇺 Luxembourgish coworking group goes all in on member app.

Gosia Kramer shares why The Office is diving into their app experience. In their newly released app, their members can do the usual things like booking meeting rooms and managing their memberships, and getting keyless access to the physical space.

But members can also order plant-based food delivered right to their desk, and participate in a new freelancer-to-project matching system.

Excited to see how different spaces are leveraging tech into their operational stack!

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🗺 Workspace utilization OS and sensor co’s team up.

Ubiqisense and Incube Space have announced an integration that makes getting utilization data into the latter’s CubeOS more seamlessly.

Data, integrations and business intelligence are going to be huge for how the physical world of work is designed, managed and leveraged.

(And I’m not just saying that because of my involvement with Syncaroo).

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🛋 Partnership introduces office budgeting & planning technology.

Melanie Jones announces that after several years of work CORT Space360™ Powered by FastOffice® has launched!

The budgeting and 3D visualization technology platform is designed to help clients virtually assess and design office space needs, and shorten their real estate decision-making process.

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📈 Coworking data.

🏡 Research article finds rural coworking is getting contagious.

This Regional Studies Association article looks into the changing dynamics of rural coworking, and draws on interviews with 15 coworking operators.

They examine the new opportunities that coworking offers to integrate rural entrepreneurs and commuters in their communities and potentially to renegotiate interdependencies between urban and rural regions.

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🇬🇧 Coworking passes also popular in the UK.

Tushar Agarwal shares a snapshot (with actual numbers missing) on the growth in bookings for on-demand space bookings via the Hubble Pass offering.

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🤝 Coworking market moves.

💼 Booking app reports record no. of bookings per month.

Deskpass shared a blog post on their explosive growth in number of bookings, a 10x jump in corporate business customers and a slew of new US and international city launches.

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🛋 Global booking platform launches new corp flex brand.

Ciaran Delaney shares that meetingsbooker have launched a new enterprise flex workspace brand called hubli.

The new platform focusses on giving companies, and their employees, access to flexible workspaces (including meeting rooms, office space and group stays) via a centralized system. The original platform will continue to operate to focus on B2C and other existing segments.

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👩‍⚖️ European coworking pioneer files for bankruptcy

Betahaus opened in Berlin in 2009, and was one of the first coworking spaces in Germany and has been credited with making coworking ‘mainstream’ in the country’s media.

This week the company has filed for bankruptcy, as they restructure their business to focus on reducing liabilities with their second location, shift towards tech, and make their original coworking space more sustainable.

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🎙 Coworking conversations.

Jean-Yves Huwart and Liz Elam discuss their conferences, and how aggregators will play a huge role in the future of coworking.  

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Bernie Mitchell and Shazia Mustafa discuss working like a woman – traditional roles, childcare and privilege. 

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Jamie Russo chats with Jenny Poon about automation hacks, buying a building and how a management agreement can go wrong. 

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📆 Coworking events.

📸 Coworking + instagram Convo.

The Sept 24th Coworking Convo dives into how coworking spaces can use Instagram to grow their memberships and revenues.

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🇪🇺 Rural Coworking across Europe.

The London Coworking Assembly are hosting a free event to discuss some of the challenges rural coworking space operators face -from finding (public) funding to the need to explain coworking and its value proposition all over again.

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🔥 Capturing the opportunity of corporate flex.

The Global Workspace Association are hosting a free event on Sept 15th on ‘growth hacking’ for flex workspaces.

Topics that will be covered include enterprise customers needs (for hybrid), a look into the data, and some ways operators are capturing the growing demand for corp flex.

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📑 Next cohort of Creative Coworking Partnerships course.

Jamie Russo and Michael Abrams are kicking off their next cohort for their course on Sept 13th to help both operators and landlords understand the economics of the increasingly popular management agreement.

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🗽 GCUC is back in NYC (and online).

GCUC returns Sept 27-29 for a hybrid event, based in both NYC or virtually online.

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💼 Coworking jobs.

Find or post coworking jobs for free here.

About This.

ThisWeekInCoworking.com is a weekly newsletter summarizing the coworking celebrations, stories, market moves, tech updates and discussions you may have missed.

Newsletters are curated by Hector Kolonas and made available for free via email or this website.

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