Week 29, 2022

Workthere share their third annual Flexmark research report, exploring various aspects of the flexible office market including profitability, how space is used, who uses these spaces, what the current demands of flex look like and what the future holds for the industry.

Key takeaways: Private office occupancy up to 81.2% compared to 68.1% last year and 81.4% pre-pandemic. Shared space is also up to 69% from 55.7% and beating pre-pandemic numbers (60.2%). Profit margins have also improved with 55% of providers having at least 10% margins (48% have margins over 15%). 79% of providers also said that spaces were not being used on a "maximum capacity basis", showing a shift towards designs enabling activity-based work instead. And finally the main industries driving demand are tech (35%), business products/services( 26%) and financial services (17%), whilst corporate/scale-ups now account for 42% of flex utilization.

Rubberdesk shared their latest flex market report for Australia. I appreciate that their team have not email-gated this report for ThisWeekInCoworking readers.

Demand up nationally, esp in Sydney and Brisbane. In the former demand for midsize offices pushed prices up 4.9% to $900 per desk. Supply in Melbourne up 10% but demand stays flat. Brisbane also sees demand-driven 13% increase in prices per desk. Prices in North Sydney fell for the 2nd consecutive quarter to $483 p/desk, whilst in Canberra they’re up 6% to $518 and average price in Adelaide is also up to $557.

Anna Tong wrote a fascinating piece in The San Francisco Standard on how more than half the city’s publicly traded companies have ‘gone remote’ and what it means for the hyperlocal economy.

Interestingly, 52% of the public companies with HQs in SF have shifted to ‘remote’, 26% are going ‘Hybrid’, 14% mixing ‘hybrid and remote’ and 5% doing something called ‘remote and in-person’. (I’m guessing the last two mean that some employees get one and others get the other. Or something like that).

Alex Fitzpatrick shares that remote work may be at an equilibrium point as just 7.1% of American workers teleworked due to the pandemic in June, and that this figure has been hovering around 7%-8% since April. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ latest report, these numbers are down from 15.4% in January, and that this rate varies significantly by industry.

_20% of info workers, 19.7% in fin/insurance and 17.6% in professional and tech services worked remotely last month, in contrast to the 2.2% in construction, 2.7% in transportation/storage and 3.6% in retail where remote isn’t really an option. These numbers also do NOT include people who worked remotely before the pandemic, or who CHOSE to keep working remotely when the pandemic was no longer the primary factor keeping them from the office. _

CBRE have released their EMEA Flex Report for H1 2022.

It’s a great deep dive into some of the macroeconomic trends at play, including that although leasing activity by flex operators is up (a whopping 125% increase in Western Europe), the overall rate of flex stock being delivered has slowed. They also highlight that a large number of organizations "see flex as a growing part of the solution to their space needs".

Sammy Rosen shares an interesting nugget of data from the distributed companies who leverage Deskpass to book their teams’ spaces.

In it he shares that 35.2% of the teams (who have an average size of 400 employees) have members in 5+ cities. Whilst the majority (64%) have team members spread between 2 and 4 cities, there’s also over 14% who are spread over 10+ cities.