🎉 Coworking celebrations.
🧁 Untethered soft launches
Jamie Orr shares that after a turbulent year, which includes a full regional fire evacuation atop the ‘usual’ pandemic-based delays, and new business and space stresses, Untethered has officially opened on the shores of Lake Tahoe.
Congrats, all the best of luck and thanks for being part of the This Week In Coworking community.
This Week is sponsored by…Upflex!
The team at Upflex wish you all a lovely end of the year, and are excited to help flexible workspaces attract even more customers and bookings in 2022! We invite you to join 650+ coworking brands with 5,500+ locations who list with us for free, with no membership fees, or setup costs.
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Coworking news & views.
🎁 Great content & community building idea: Local Gift Guides.
The team at Ascender have returned with their second annual Small Business Gift Guide, featuring and supporting local entrepreneurs.
A fantastic way to drive hyperlocal economic activity at a time where everyone is looking for interesting gifts, and even promote coworking memberships.
🗓 8 end-of-the-year blog post ideas for coworking spaces.
Cat Johnson hits it out of the park again with this resourceful post, sharing 8 ideas that any coworking space can use as blog (and/or social media) content before the end of the year, and early into 2022.
🖐 Five concepts a top workplace strategy consultant keeps repeating.
Phil Kirschner shared an interesting post on LinkedIn highlighting 5 concepts he’s found himself repeating over and over again.
I’d def check it out, but in short they are seating demand, third places, reservations, seats-v-people and the “return” to the office.
Let him (and us) know what you agree/disagree with in the comments, and do let folks know you’re joining the conversation via this newsletter.
🤑 Talking landlords’ language to secure management agreements.
Launch Workplaces share an interesting landlord-focussed piece, focussing on the 40% bump in savings when converting coworking members into tenants.
Graduating members (ie businesses who outgrow coworking offerings) are a huge opportunity for landlords, who can offer these businesses more traditional offerings within the same buildings at a huge saving compared to sourcing tenants on the open market. Great to see this opportunity angle articulated so well. Are you using this angle in your landlord discussions? If not, why not?
🏢 How landlords value and asses risk of flex office space.
Andrew Skinner from Savills digs into the fair value risk of flex space offerings for landlords.
Any operator looking to partner with landlords through management agreements (or otherwise) would benefit from seeing the terminology and worries (read:risks) that landlords are being advised on regarding flex workspace.
✌️ UK coworking brand launches 2 initiatives around urbanization.
Huckletree have announced two initiatives to help tackle some of the challenges we’ll face if rings true that 68% of the global population will be urbanized by 2050.
Alpha Accelerator is a 12-week program to supercharge pre-seed strategies for startups with at least one underrepresented founder and the Earthrise Sustainability Summit will return to assemble a diverse network to debate the road to a sustainable Urban Future.
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💻 Coworking technology.
🎯 Management system begins promoting marketing automations
Nexudus have announced their partnership with Syncaroo to help operators streamline marketing & sales processes that help grow coworking or flex workspaces.
The new integration allows operators to sync their workspace data with a variety of dynamic platforms, widgets and channels.
🚀 To see where tech is going, look at where it’s beginning.
Mark Smukler shares an honest and open report of how Flow began, where they’ve gotten to in under a year (spoiler alert, 50+ location partners in London, ~3k monthly active users, and $10k+ gross revenue) and what’s next (spoiler again: funding, Web3 and NYC).
Personally, I love behind-the-scenes stories like this that highlight the humans and emotions behind the tech that enables the world to work flexibly. It’s actually what drove me to curate all those 30s quarterly update videos featuring the faces behind the tech that powers our spaces during 2019 and 2020. Maybe it’s time to bring that back?
Oh and if you’d like to be connected with Mark, reply to this email and I’ll make a direct intro.
💰 All-in-one coworking ops platform raises 7 figures.
DeskNow have announced a $1.2M funding round. The platform offers operators a management system, a booking system, a secure access solution, and a marketplace for additional or unused space.
The founders believe that “hybrid work should be as easy and intuitive for employees as booking a hotel or flight”, I agree, but think it’ll become even easier, given the vast majority of people need space to work more often than they travel.
⏱ Flex space management tech adds time-saving integrations
Satellite Deskworks, who provide workspace management tech designed to help operators build & run more profitable and sustainable spaces, have made their first integration with Syncaroo available.
This integration allows operators to jump the queue into the private beta and begin automating updates to various marketing, lead-generation and sales channels including boutique brokers, dynamic widgets and a growing number of aggregator platforms.
Coworking data.
📲 Emerging patterns in a post-pandemic workpace.
Thijs van der Burgt shares some insights from an analysis of 1,700+ Office App user’s in-app behavior.
Key points to note that although meeting room bookings (between Q1/20 to Q2/21) was down 30%, the number of spaces booked per individual was up 75%.
The data also shines a light on the shift of planning & collaboration meeting times or sessions from Mondays, to Tuesdays and Thursdays.
About day rates from 4,500 offices & meeting rooms.
CloudVO shared (behind an email form) their annual ‘Meeting Room Business Review of Shared Office Spaces in the US‘ report.
In it they share data around desk and meeting room bookings (by the day) across 1,600+ locations. Interesting data takeaways include that independent operators (who are partnered with the platform) on average make more meeting rooms available than Regus, and that 54% of partnered operators offer at least one Day Office.
The data also dives into benchmarks for average hourly prices by room size, the median average being $35 p/h for day offices and $44, $55 and $79 per hour for small, medium and large meeting rooms respectively (even though average prices are slightly higher).
Other data sets shared are expected monthly revenue per room size in the US (assuming 100 hours of monthly utilization), and per square foot.
👩💻 What 6000 employees want from the future of work.
Dominic Price shares results from Atlassian‘s survey of 6k employees, following a previous survey a year earlier.
It’s an insightful piece, but a key number for our industry is that 78% of respondents want to keep flex work arrangements & have the option to work remotely.
Interestingly 49% would quit their jobs if it became clear that employer’s values did not align with their own, so a huge plus for spaces investing into initiatives that align with or boost those of remote employers.
💥 Measurable impact of virtual vs in-person conferences.
Kate Lister shares results of a study into the impact of virtual vs in-person conference attendance on cost, diversity, carbon footprint and collaboration.
Key takeaways are an increase in gender & cultural diversity, increased engagement from early-cereer attendees, reduced travels costs boosted attendance, async improved participation over timezones and 7000 virtual attendees had the same carbon footprint as one in-person attendee.
📈 Benchmarks on coworking pricing, supply and brands.
Global market intelligence firm CoworkIntel shared their 2021 data snapshot. The article links to a presentation (behind an email capture) that dives into the trends around supply and rates they measured.
In summary global supply is increasing (16% up in Europe alone), the size of brands in the market have also increased (up 6%) and coworking desks are becoming more affordable (down 6% worldwide over last 6 months).
Coworking market moves.
🏬 Global brokerage backs workspace experience platform.
HqO have announced that JLL has made a strategic investment, bringing their workplace experience tech to the latter’s clients both on-site and digitally.
The platform did already have JLL Spark as investor since 2018, and have now secured follow-on corporate funding from the JLL who are doubling (or tripling) down on their proptech ecosystem and portfolio.
👨🎨 Firm raises $8M+ to transform office leasing and servicing.
Kitt have announced a new funding round, bringing the total raised to just under $16M since the company launched in 2019.
The platform allows the delivery of bespoke offices for businesses, covering the whole process from finding & designing the space, to handling legal agreements and managing all suppliers from one place.
🌍 Corp. coworking platform puts down roots in EMEA via acquisition.
Matthew Neville breaks the story about Upflex‘s acquisition of WorkClub.
The move creates Upflex EMEA (following the June ’21 expansion into Asia through Upflex India) and will bring the WorkClub’s team and network of locations into the Upflex platform.
📹 Coworking videos.
🤯 Move over Zoom, meet … HoloPortation?!
David Nussbaum demos PORTL‘s new HoloPortation tech, which beams 4k resolution image in real-time.
I can imagine this being used for CEOs speaking to remote teams gathering within your spaces, or for hosting virtual speakers in a more “realistic” and engaging way.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Gina Schreck, James Wahba, Iris Kavanagh, Jerome Chang, Darshan Lakhani and others discuss last week’s newsletter and the opportunity of hotel + coworking operator partnerships.
Bernie J Mitchell chats with Will Bennis of Prague University of Economics and Business & Locus Workspace in the Czech Republic about research underway about how office layouts influence work performance and well-being among freelancers, entrepreneurs, and remote workers.
Sherri Tao, Nir Kelner and Konrad Szaruga discussed the opportunity for coworking spaces around hosting corporate workers and teams at Coworking Europe‘s virtual conference.
Jamie Russo and Miro Miroslavov discuss the first FlexIndex that provides visibility into the flex space industry’s health, post-lockdown recovery, and global trends.
Monica Solak and Chase Garbarino discuss the future of flexible workspaces and the strategies behind creating engaging hybrid work environment.
📆 Coworking events.
📱 Discuss this newsletter.
Dec 17: Join fellow newsletter readers in a discussion about this week’s news, views, data, updates and trends they represent.
💼 Coworking jobs.
Find or post coworking jobs for free here.
