🎉 Coworking celebrations.
🎂 Union Worx turned 3!
🇦🇺 Hub Adelaide officially opened.
John Preece shares thanks to the Premier of South Australia, Steven Marshall for officially opening the latest Hub Australia location in Adelaide.
🗽 The Malin launched in SoHo
Charlie Robinson also notes that ahead of the official opening “most membership tiers are already 70-100% sold”.
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📰 Coworking updates.
📹 Great TED talk on rejuvenating “underdog” cities.
Irma L. Olguin Jr, CEO & co-founder of Bitwise Industries, shares a fantastic TED talk about how it’s not just computer skills that are stopping people (and communities) from breaking into tech. Instead the biggest hurdles are things like access to childcare, transportation and financial stability.
It’s fascinating to hear more about the work they’re doing to uplift and empower people in her community in Fresno, California – and how it can become a model to elevate other “underdog” communities across the world.
🧮 Will new accounting standard boost or harm coworking demand?
Jerome Chang shares a news story detailing that commercial leases must now be shown on balance sheets as risks (or liabilities). Whilst flexible workspaces can lower the total liability, it does mean that larger employers will need to maintain a ‘lease portfolio’ to keep track of what space (or planes, equipment, and cars) are leased for reporting on the balance sheet.
For businesses using multiple coworking providers, or a mix of traditional and flex options, could this could push many to demand a centralized point for managing all their memberships and leases?
💡 As competition grows, so will creativity for market reach.
The team from NearU (a workspace booking platform in the UK) share a teaser of an on-the-ground campaign they’re running ahead of a more public launch this month.
I share this as a reminder that as aggregators and booking platforms compete for demand, more creative campaigns will be launched online and offline, all ultimately pointing more humans towards flexible spaces.
🇻🇳 How one flex operator is positioning themselves.
Daan van Rossum shares that a) demand for flex is skyrocketing in Vietnam with the lockdowns announced to end and b) how their offerings at Dreamplex can help out companies who need and want more flexibility.
The 14 slides are impressive and effective. Are you leveraging LinkedIn and slides? If not, why not?
🦁 On the shift towards Coworking Trips (and African safaris).
The European Coworking Assembly shares a piece featuring Simon Lewis from Coworking Days about his fascinating Coworking Safaris offering.
The company coordinates group or corporate workation trips in beautiful Cape Town. Attendees work from coworking spaces in between enjoying breathtaking tourist destinations and experiences.
As a South African myself, I truly believe that visiting the country, and taking in a safari should be on every single bucketlist.
🗞 NY Times explores the suburban coworking bet.
A whole bunch of TWIC readers shared Nicole Hong and Matthew Haag‘s New York Times story on the surge in spaces, startups and demand for coworking in suburbs.
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💻 Coworking technology.
New tool enables rapid space planning & reconfiguring.
Aaron Fritsch shares how Archilogic (a tool for rapidly turning floor plans into powerful digital assets) has released a new tool for quickly designing floorplans from scratch, or reconfiguring them in just a few clicks.
📲 On helping spaces accommodate transient demand.
In this Market Makers Q&A post for Syncaroo, I chat with Mark Smukler about Flow and how, and why, they’re helping workspaces accommodate drop-in workers.
🗺 Booking app adds social calendar for nearby collaborations.
James Solomides shares NearU‘s newest feature, a tool to see which colleagues or contacts are working nearby.
Given that whole new markets adopting flex workspaces, providing mechanisms for enabling connecting and collaboration are going to be increasingly popular.
📈 Tally Market bookings up by 66%.
In Laura Beales‘ October roundup for Tally Market, they shared that bookings are up and they launched reviews, improved search and launched a slack integration.
🕹 Can tech make offices more attractive and sustainable?
Ronen Journo, from Hines and prev-WeWork and 20 year Cisco-er, shares a few examples of how tech can be used to make offices more attractive & sustainable.
A quote that caught my eye was that “the workplace has become a hub for experience, much like the hospitality sector, and technology is aiding such a drive”.
🆕 OfficeRnD announces new platform features & tools.
In their October update, and following both their FlexWorld event and recent fundraise, workspace management tech co OfficeRnD announced 4 new features.
They are custom data dashboards, integrated mobile door access, multi-space accounts, and upgrades to their built-in food & beverage (F&B) tools.
Coworking data.
🗳 2021 US Workplace Survey uncovers why employees need offices
Gensler‘s latest research reveals that top performing companies value the office for more than just collaboration. They explore what kinds of workspace access employees at both top performing and unranked companies prefer.
Interestingly the data breaks down responses between company’s offices, coworking or third spaces and employees homes.
Loads to unpack on this one. h/t Kayley DiCicco for sharing this one.
📈 Percentage of remote work HN job listings spikes to 80ish
From source to post: José María Mateos‘ generated and shared a chart showing the change in the percentage of Hacker News job postings that mention a remote work option. Paul Graham then noted that this looks like a permanent shift, and Tushar Agarwal shared that a company’s workspace strategy is now their talent strategy.
Nearly 23,500 coworking seats filled last quarter.
Economic Times shared that coworking spaces in India’s top 8 markets are seeing a further surge in demand.
Amit Ramani, CEO of Awfis, and Neetish Sarda, Founder of Smartworks both share that they’ve filled 9k seats each, with the former booking 4,5k in September alone. Nikhil Madan, co-founder at The Office Pass, also shares that their centers are operating at 90% capacity. Rajat Johar, Country Head, Skootr, shared that they’ve seen a 60% increase in requests and expect to be 90% full by the end of the year. Nidhi Marwah, Group Managing Director at The Executive Centre also shared that their occupancy has increased to 90%.
A bunch of this demand is going through aggregators like Stylework, whose founder Sparsh Khandelwal shared that they expect to fill 1,800 seats in October, had filled 1,200 in September and that their previous monthly averages were around 750.
Coworking market moves.
💼 Tech co-founder launches fully automated space offering
Brian and Bonnie Watson recently acquired 5 Proximity Space locations, and relaunched them as fully automated workspaces called Alt Space.
What’s also interesting here, apart from totally unmanaged spaces, is that Brian is also a cofounder at the coworking-tech company Proximity Space, who if I understand correctly used to run those spaces.
🤖 Are we headed to tech-powered v2 of workspace brokers?
Patrick Sisson dives into how (and why) the US’s biggest brokerages have invested almost $1.5B into proptech deals over the last decade.
If brokers are upgrading their tools, soon they’ll want or need flex spaces to integrate to fill desks, offices and floors faster. Right?
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Kristin Schwab discusses why more companies are hiring heads of remote work. Darren Murph, Head of Remote at recently IPO’d GitLab contributes and notes that remote work makes him a better dad.
Alex Ahom and Edo Sadiković discuss cross culture rural coworking & coliving.
Daniel Rosenzweig and Josef Katz discuss EY‘s new report based on 500 execs in the US who were surveyed as part of the inaugural Future Workplace Index.
Jamie Russo shares her experience, and frustrations, in joining a coworking space.
📆 Coworking events.
🤝 Coworking + Sponsors
Nov 19. Coworking Convo dives into working with sponsors to strengthen coworking brands.
💼 Coworking jobs.
Find or post coworking jobs for free here.
