This Week is sponsored by…IMMERSIVE 2022.
Join us at the GWA’s first-ever IMMERSIVE event which will be held on June 28-29 at Studio by Tishman Speyer in NYC.
(P.S. Hector will be speaking on the tech + daytime hospitality panel, and you can use code syncaroo50 for 50% off your ticket.)
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✊ Coworking impact.
🇬🇧 Founder of coworking space in Nottingham asks for help #
Starting and growing a coworking space and community is hard. You know it. Recently Jessica Berry asked for some support via LinkedIn for The Co-Working Clubhouse in what they describe is a make or break couple of months.
If you can, please do pop by and see if you can share or contribute, even if it’s just supportive words from fellow operators or professionals around the world.
👉 Read this.
🆕 BIPOC Coworking Alliance invites input #
Coworks CEO DeShawn Brown is spearheading the creation of a new Alliance. It’s early days yet, so any and all voices are welcome to shape the mission and goals.
👉 Read this.
🏳️🌈 How one firm is supporting Pride Month and the LGBTQIA+ Community #
Gable have been working on a few initiatives for Pride Month. One of them is this blog post that outlines their values of Pride, how they embody Pride throughout the rest of the year, and efforts to donate a % of booking revenue to The Trevor Project for any bookings made in June.
👉 Read this.
Coworking news & views.
🇿🇦 Why a VP of People disliked working from a coworking space #
Nadia Vatalidis, who is a VP of People at Remote, shares why she was felt underwhelmed working from a coworking space in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Whilst it’s lovely to hear what folks like/love about coworking spaces, I find it’s always insightful to see why anyone doesn’t enjoy or benefit from the experience. Key factors that detracted from her working day: cost, rules around calls and access to private call space, distractions, traffic. Also interesting to read the many responses so far.
👉 Read this.
👩💼 For sales teams, remote work works. #
Phil Kirschner shares an article by Jennifer Stanley and Julia McClatchy that digs into why remote sales is here to stay (spoiler: because it works, very very well).
Touting increased number of accounts reached (4x) and up to 50% more revenue generated, we may be seeing more sales professionals shifting to remote work.
As operators of spaces who could host these sales professionals, how can you take advantage of this opportunity? More phone booths, better acoustics, sales-friendly rooms/areas or floors?
👉 Read this.
🇦🇺 Competition heats up between landlords and coworking spaces. #
Kate Jones shares that in Australia, coworking spaces and commercial office landlords are “battling it out” for the same sets of business. The latter are offering shorter leases, collaboration spaces and many have opened up their own flex brands. In response coworking spaces are lowering their rates to beat the lower prices offered by landlords on longer lease terms.
The piece also notes two interesting stats. According to Rubberdesk, vacancies rates dropped 5.2% at flex spaces across Australia in Q4/21, whilst national vacancy rates for commercial offices rose to 12.1% in the six months to Jan 2022.
👉 Read this.
🎯 What’s the most impactful form of advertising for coworking? Community. #
Simone Franke dives into community-building and it’s impact on attracting new members for coworking spaces in this Q&A post.
👉 Read this.
🇨🇿 Czech space planning Nomad Month #
Mathias Vanluchene shared with me that their coworking space, Locus Workspace, are organizing Nomad Month to bring remote workers from across the world to work alongside each other in Prague. The idea is to provide attendees with a local experience, a global network and an all inclusive offer of somewhere to stay, work and connect between August 20th and September 16th.
I love seeing initiatives like this, and think there’s a lot of collaboration that can happen between operators serving remote and nomadic workers. If you’d like to reach out the Mathias and the Locus team to discuss ideas, there’s some links at the bottom of their site to get in touch. But don’t forget to let me know how you get on, so I can share that with the global TWIC community too!
👉 Read this.
😃 The Future of Work and The Value of Close Proximity #
Neil Usher highlights one of the major questions that are asked in coworking, which is “who is your coworking space for?”. The answer to this changes from person-to-person and it may seem like there is no clear and concise answer. However, we are able to figure out the importance of the spaces we have and how they are able to evolve to fit into today’s society.
👉 Read this.
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Coworking data.
🇮🇳 Flex space footprint reaches 40M sqft and expected to grow to 75M sqft. #
moneycontrol shares a summary of a joint report by Qdesq and JLL called ‘Indian Office market: Recalibrating with Flex’.
Other numbers include that over 90,200 flex seats were booked across the top 7 cities in 2021, a 2.5x year-on-year improvement from 12 months previously. The number of enquiries doubled over the same period, translating to over 214,000 seats booked via 15,000 leads.
👉 Read this.
🇫🇷 France sees growth to almost 3,000 coworking spaces #
Bruno Rebille shares some numbers from France alongside a few suggestions for operators to consider when picking which marketplaces to list on.
Bruno is the founder of Choose & Work, a coworking aggregator in the French market, and I appreciated seeing (and sharing) views from and about aggregators, or marketplaces, in the region.
What caught my eye is that the number of flex spaces in France has raced up to almost 3,000 locations nationwide since 2015.
👉 Read this.
🧮 How does product popularity change by member count? #
Marc Navarro summarizes an interesting subset of Nexudus’ Flexspace Observatory data – the popularity of different offerings based on the size of a coworking space. They do so by assessing contracts (ie memberships) across the data, and then breaking them down by the size of the spaces, in number of members.
Key takeaways: Hot Desks are now more popular than Dedicated Desks. Hot Desks are the most popular for all spaces, until you surpass 250 members, in which case Offices regain the top product spot. Also interesting is that Virtual offices seem most popular in spaces with between 41 and 101 members.
👉 Read this.
🇺🇸 Most US cities have flex space supply/demand imbalance #
Meeting room demand is up 26% from last year, contract lengths are up 40% and average number of seats per membership is up 40% according to The Instant Group’s latest North America Flex Market Review.
Demand in the region did dip 1% in Q1 from Q4 2022, following that year’s 57% surge in demand from pre-pandemic numbers.
Note: The full report is behind an email gate, but I think the summary around meeting room demand and contract lengths being up made sharing this worthwhile. Moving forward however, I won’t be sharing any new reports locked behind email gates.
👉 Read this.
Coworking market moves.
🇮🇳 Remote-first org signs up for multicity coworking access #
Cactus Communications shared that they’ve signed up their full-time employees for WeWork access across major metro areas in India namely Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Gurugram, Noida, and Hyderabad.
Just a reminder that many remote-ready organizations are actively working on, and signing multi-location (and sometimes multi-brand) deals to give their employees drop-in or longer-term access and choices of coworking spaces.
👉 Read this.
🆕 New workspace opens in Melbourne #
Tashi Dorjee and Goldfields Group share that The Loft has officially opened in South Yarra.
From what I understand this is another space supported and run by JLL’s Flex team in partnership with the landlord.
👉 Read this.
🏢 IWG hits 4k milestone #
Wayne Berger, CEO of The Americas at IWG, shares that the network have surpassed 4,000 flex space locations worldwide.
👉 Read this.
🇦🇺 Industrious expanding to Australia #
Jamie Hodari announced that Industrious are expanding to Sydney, Australia.
👉 Read this.
🇮🇳 Stakeholder change up at on of India’s biggest operators #
Mint reports that a shift may be happening behind the scenes at Awfis, one of India’s 5 biggest coworking space operators. The post is speculative, but does quote 3 anonymous sources, and states that a couple of family offices who were early investors are exiting the business ahead of a $40M investment from VC firm A19.
As mentioned last week, India is one of the biggest flex space markets on the planet, so keeping an eye on funding and expansion moves across this regions is a good idea, especially as demand continues to grow so rapidly.
Reminder: Flex space demand in the region is up over 26x from 2017 (43M sqft in Q1/23 from 1.6M sqft in 2017) according to Avendus Capital data.
👉 Read this.
🌏 APAC flex group doubles size through M&A and partnerships #
Chris Edwards shared that The Flexi Group have doubled in size in Singapore and Australia. The former is through the acquisition of two former Found8 sites, and the latter was through a partnership with Aussie developers like Hirsch & Faigen.
👉 Read this.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Mike LaRosa (Upflex) moderates a discussion between Dave Cairns (CBRE), Alex Morris (McKinsey & Company) and Sami Hero (Remo) around what the future of ‘The Office’ is in a remote world at the Running Remote conference.
Jerry Alexander and Adam Blaskey chat about technology and flex space on the Commercial Property Investors podcast.
Jamie Russo discusses coworking, self-storage and co-warehousing with Laura and Dave Fisher on the Everything Coworking podcast.
Giovanni Palavicini and Jamie Russo chat with Mark Rose from Avison Young about using data to make real estate decisions on the Flex Uncensored podcast.
In the second part of their Everything Coworking conversation Brian Watson shares with Jamie Russo just how automation frees up Alt Spaces’ human ambassadors or Community Managers to focus on hospitality, community building, etc
📆 Coworking events.
🚀 Convo: Your Neighborhood as a Marketing Tool #
June 24: Your surrounding community is a huge marketing tool for your space. How do you leverage it? Let’s chat about it. Join us for a free, informal, community conversation with fellow workspace operators and coworking pros.
👉 Read this.
🗽 IMMERSIVE 2022 #
Jun 28 & 29: The GWA Board of Directors is excited to host the first annual IMMERSIVE event; your behind-the-scenes opportunity to experience and engage with key players offering best-in-class hospitality in the flex space industry. As we venture into the third evolution of flex, it’s more important than ever to have a full picture of how
👉 Read this.
Convo: Monetizing Idle Areas in Your Coworking Space #
June 30: There’s no atmosphere killer like an unactivated, unused space. How can you turn your unused space into a revenue generator and use it to provide new services to your members?
Let’s chat about it.
👉 Read this.
😃 Coworking Marketing Round Table #
June 29th: Maybe for you, it seems everyone but you has their marketing act together. What tactic should you do next, first? How much should you be spending on marketing? Does advertising on Facebook or with Google work?
The London Coworking Assembly be doing a marketing round table to help address these. It’ll be a fast-paced curated discussion to tease out the confusion and blocks we all experience as we strive to communicate any product or service.
👉 Read this.
EMPATHY & AI & Coworking #
July 4: Join Lena and Minter for a powerful one-hour workshop, designed specifically for London-based coworking space owners and community managers.
Delve into the intriguing relationship between Empathy and AI, and how these concepts are shaping the future of work.
👉 Read this.