ThisWeekIn Coworking

Week 25, 2023

This week's summaries include which flex products are most popular, stakeholder shifts in India, Nomad Month, a BIPOC alliance, expansions in APAC, Africa and more.

โœŠ Coworking impact.

๐Ÿ†• 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.

– Shared by Lauren

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€๐ŸŒˆ 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.

– Shared by Taylor

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿ“ฐ Coworking news & views.

๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฟ 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!

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

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๐Ÿ’ป Coworking technology.

๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Partnership brings PON to the UK #

Preferred Office Network and NewFlex (the provider behind brands like Citibase, easyHub, BOLD, Serendipity Labs, Fredericks, XCHG Spaces, and Quad across the UK and Europe) have announced a strategic partnership to make the latter’s UK-based spaces discoverable and bookable via the former’s on-demand booking site.

– Shared by Caroline

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿ“ˆ Coworking data.

๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท 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.

– Shared by Helga

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿงฎ 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.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ 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.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿค Coworking market moves.

๐Ÿข IWG hits 4k milestone #

Wayne Berger, CEO of The Americas at IWG, shares that the network have surpassed 4,000 flex space locations worldwide.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ Industrious expanding to Australia #

Jamie Hodari announced that Industrious are expanding to Sydney, Australia.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ 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.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐ŸŒ 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.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐ŸŒ Hotel-based flex space chain launches in Africa #

Back in week 23/2022 I shared that WOJO would be expanding into Africa.

This week they announced the first step of that expansion into Africa, following growth in Europe and Latin America, with the launch of a space in Nairobi within an Accor hotel.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

๐ŸŽ™ Coworking conversations.

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

๐ŸŽง Listen to this.

๐Ÿ“† Coworking events.

Convo: Monetizing Idle Areas in Your Coworking Space #

June 30: โ€‹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?

โ€‹Let’s chat about it.

๐Ÿ‘‰ 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.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read this.

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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