Week 39, 2023

Billy Hodges shared CBRE UK’s European Flex Office Market Update for the first half of 2023. It looks at slower operator take-up (as we’ve seen in other reports), how corporates are actually leveraging more flex space than they predicted they would last year, and that there’s also ‘significant room to grow’. The report also highlights how flex space operators and businesses are outperforming traditional leasing with regards to sustainability agendas.

REFIRE shares a summary of various market reports. A CBRE report notes that the "number of office tenants looking to lease more than half of their space flexibly has increased tenfold since last year".

The piece also highlights new players or expansions from firms like Vonovia, Orangery and Primestar. Cushman & Wakefield notes that flex space accounts for just 1.1% of the total office stock in the Top 7 cities in Germany. Savills, however, predicts that the flex office segment will play an increasingly important role in European office markets, growing its share of the European office market to around 20% within ten years.

Mindspace shared their Employee Wellbeing Insights 2023 report. Their survey of 2000 employed office workers across 7 countries uncovered a mental health crisis, and highlighted what employers can do about it.

The top way to improve employee wellbeing? 35% says flexible work options. Other ways coworking brands could help? Healthy eating options, offsites and on-site gyms.

Lee Wilkinson shares the PwC UK piece that looks at the state of the UK office market, whilst not strictly coworking-related data, it’s definitely data worth keeping in mind.

Key takeaways are that building costs are up 41% from 2020, 33M sqft of office space has an EPC rating of D or below, 9% of UK spaces have a EPC rating of F or G and not suitable for leasing.

Researchers at CoworkingCafe set out to determine where in the U.S. coworking is most accessible near a university campus. By analyzing the number of coworking spaces within a two-mile radius of the top 100 universities in the country, they found that 80% of them had at least 1 coworking space within 2 miles of the campus (with the median average being 3).

New York University boasts the highest number of coworking spaces around its campus – 220 – both nationally and in the Middle Atlantic area, George Washington University takes the 2nd spot nationally with 74 spaces, while the University of Illinois at Chicago rounds out the top 3 nationally with 66 coworking spaces.

The Instant Group shared their most recent UK flex market report. The data is similar to what Instant CMO shared recently on stage at GWA last week, noting that the spike we all saw in 2021 may have just been a blip, but that demand is stabilizing.

Catalyst notes that "the report sets out the challenges and the opportunities in our sector, but what stands out noticeably is the opportunity in areas outside of London where demand outstrips supply: in towns and cities such as Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham and Bristol."