Week 3, 2024

To your spaces’ very own homepage or website that is. Caitlin Fitton shared that Roam have revamped the booking process and experience on their own website.

With so many top leads coming through brands’ websites – expect to see more and innovation and investment going into how to make booking and accessing spaces as seamless (if not delightful) as possible.

Sonae Sierra share that Centro Colombo (a shopping mall in Lisbon) has launched a drop-in coworking concept called "[My Place] To Co-work". The space offers 11 workstations for individuals and groups, bookable via a mobile app, is free for mall visitors.

"WTF is phygital!?" you may be asking. It’s a marketing/consulting term used to describe "the blending of digital experiences with physical ones". Love it? Hate it?

What will the future of work look like? What do RTO mandates mean for the office in 2024? And how do coworking places fit into the picture? Brain Embassy asked Amogh Mogre, from zapfloor, for his insider views on a few office trends for 2024.

In short they are that employees are (finally) in the driver’s seat, corporates discovering coworking, how tech helps build communities and that more ecosystems will pop up everywhere.

The FT shares a piece this week that looks at how in some organizations, including their own offices, there’s an almost never ending mission to find free meeting rooms.

This tells us three things. 1. Many companies are still underestimating how many meeting rooms they need, especially post-pandemic and in a hybrid work world. 2. Flex spaces also need to make sure they have enough private or meeting spaces. 3. There’s an opportunity to provide spillover spaces to the bigger businesses within the same building, street or area.

OFS shared that they’ve acquired cubicle and phone booth company ROOM. The former has been on a bit of an M&A adventure of late, bringing ROOM into a group including Carolina, Bryan Ashley and Styline Logistics.

Why does this matter in coworking? Well phone booths and other modular meeting rooms are increasingly popular/useful in flex spaces. Maybe this will bring ROOM even further into the flex workspace world.

Tracey Prisk from Mortgage Professionals Australia shares insights from Hub Australia’s chief property officer John Preece around what’s changing in Australia’s office market. It’s an interesting look at some numbers we’ve seen before.

For example, if Sydney’s office occupancy stabilizing at 65% and Melbourne at 50% against pre-pandemic levels, and those levels were at a relatively low 50-60% in real terms – that means actual occupancy of offices are sitting around 25-30% in Australia.

With continued downsizing, Australian firms are showing more demand for hospitality spaces, albeit with HQ spaces still within core CBDs for major organizations. In a surprise to nobody, valuers and financiers are still slow to adapt.