🗞 The Video Summary
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The 2022 Coworking Alliance Summit.
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🎉 Coworking celebrations.
🥈 Dayhouse gets SUPER certified!
Congrats to the team at Dayhouse Coworking for becoming officially SUPER Silver Certified!
Coworking news & views.
🧐 Dissecting that creative exclusive strategic partnership.
This week saw the announcement of a strategic partnership between WeWork and Upflex.
Even though both firms made official statements, and the news was covered by publications across the industry, the deal raised a whole bunch of questions, including from some of you who reached out to me directly with your own.
So I did what any geek would do, and dissected the partnership to highlight optimistic and pessimistic views on how it could affect 5 sectors of the flex workspace economy.
After you’ve had a read, do feel free to join the conversation on this thread.
🏳️🌈 Coworking announces second annual scholarship program.
Amy King shares that Good Coworking are once again offering two 1-year Brazen scholarships for their coworking space, to help BIPOC LGBTQIA business owners grow their businesses with less overheads.
Awesome!
🌳 Community in Hong Kong shares 2021 Sustainability Report
Banyan Workspace, which was opened in Hong Kong just two years ago by Rasheed and Amy Shroff have just published their first Sustainability Report.
I love this idea, and was fascinated to see the numbers shared, including the volume of items saved from landfills (27.2kg of glass, 10kg of plastic, 3.5kg of metal cans, 278 drink cartons, 26.5kg of food waste and 38kg of coffee grounds).
They also share a few ways they’ve leverage item reuse to reduce waste, from reusable coffee cups, tableware, lunchboxes and a soda stream to reduce need for fizzy drinks.
There’s a bunch of great insights in there, and if anyone from SUPER is reading, let’s get Banyan certified?
🇲🇾 Flex in Malaysia is here to stay.
This article shares regional insights from Vijayakumar Tangarasan (IWG), YY Lau (JLL) and Teh Young Khean (Knight Frank) about the continued shift towards flex offices and workspace in and around Malaysia.
They also highlight continued expansion of flex spaces outside of Greater Kuala Lumpur, supported by increased adoption of hybrid working.
🚃 The commute is only justified when…
Gabriela Hersham shares that when the destination is an exciting and dynamic workspace that offers you more than a WFH set-up ever could, then the commute is not a deal breaker.
In this post they share how at Huckletree they build coworking and flex workspace communities that become world-class innovation spaces that people want to travel in to.
🙋♀️ Why we still need female-centric coworking communities.
Emma Ascot shares insights from Felena Hanson (from Hera Hub) and Errin Farrell (from The Coven) about why we do still need spaces that are specifically women-centric.
They share a bunch of reasons including entrepreneurial support, offering necessities for working mothers, reducing sexual harassment and more.
A coworking space for aspiring foodpreneurs.
The Coworks team share Jason Johnson’s motivation for starting HUBB Kitchens.
Described as a coworking space for ‘foodpreneurs’” it offers kitchen space and resources for rent by the hour, week, or month.
Great to get a look behind the curtain at a facility that supports restaurant owners, private chefs, food truck vendors, beginning farmers, home-based bakers and producers, as well as private instructors and demonstrators.
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💻 Coworking technology.
🇬🇧 New UK Flex space aggregator hits 1k visitor milestone.
Harriet Walker-Arnott (aka Hattie) shares that FlowSpace, a local aggregator and workspace pass app that launched 6 months ago has hit a milestone of 1000 visitors booked through their platforms.
⚙️ Another booking platform leans into social features and integrations.
Tushar Agarwal introduces the new social features of Hubble Pass, which bring a streamlined booking process into a company’s Slack or calendar app.
Integrations and automations are going to bring booking coworking and flex spaces into whole new channels. Watch this space.
💂♀️ Legendary London VC partners with local booking platform.
Chris Smith shares that Playfair Capital have partnered up with Tally Market, to make desks in their London HQ available for booking through their platform.
Great news Jules Robertson, Laura Beales and team!
Coworking data.
🎢 Coworking shopping activity was volatile in Q4 2021.
Upsuite are back with another data-trove from Q4.
This time they compare their own data (from their platform and the SquareFoot Flexible Solutions Team) to search trend data from Google and to office occupancy data from Kastle Systems (via swipe cards).
Highlights that demand and shopping activity (ie browsing) was not spread equally across geographies, with some markets like Houston, Manhattan and Nashville seeing growth in demand (up 91%, 74% and 64% respectively) compared to big drops in “techie” cities like Seattle, Toronto, Boston and San Francisco (with 21%, 31%, 33% and 46% declines)
📈 Flex market set to rebound in 2021 says global CRE brokerage.
CBRE have released a report on Flexible Office Space in 2022, titled “Awaking an Era of Flexibility”.
In it they share that flex space in N. America showed signs of recovery in 2021, despite pandemic-related challenges. Whilst many flex providers reported a rebound in SMB sales and occupancy, the growing demand from enterprises makes them optimistic about the outlook for 2022.
“Although the omicron variant could hamper the recovery, flexible space solutions clearly will be a key part of companies’ real estate strategies as they adopt hybrid work arrangements and as new space use patterns emerge.”
The report is thorough, and looks at occupier sentiment, trends driving growth, provider transformations, possible challenges and the continued evolution of flex space.
Coworking market moves.
🏨 Hotel group goes all in on remote working spaces.
Skift reports on how the Wojo brand is exploring and expanding into train stations, airports and shopping malls. The brand is a JV between hotel group Accor and real estate group Bouygues Immobilier.
It is being expanded after success in the former’s lobbies, then in dedicated coworking spaces and even converting a whole football stadium into a remote working hub.
Stephane Bensimon says that one thousands workers used the Parc de Princes stadium back in September 2021, with a tonne more on the waitlist. The brand is also exploring management agreements as they move towards ‘Wojo As A Service’.
🤑 Boutique brokerage outperforms rivals in flex space transactions
Matt Dawkins shares that in 2021 their boutique flex space brokerage Flux made more transactions and new business deals with WeWork than any other broker or agent in London.
I’ve said it before, but workspace operators should not underestimate the power of your local, well connected, and ultra-passionate flex space brokers for bringing in new leads and sales.
🇿🇲 Pan-Africa coworking network announces new location in Lusaka
Gregoire Schwebig shared that AfricaWorks would be opening a new hub in Lusaka, Zambia.
For those of you who (like me) are following this brand’s expansion, they’re on track to offer hubs and community across 9 cities, namely Abidjan, Accra, Cape Town, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Lagos, Lusaka and Nairobi.
🇮🇳 Coworking footprint up 21% across 8 Indian cities.
Shubham Vashisht shares a post that gives us a glimpse into the continued growth of coworking space in India.
In it, we see that the space leased by coworking operators increased to 4.91M sqft in 2021 from 4.05M sqft in 2020 across Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Chennai, Kolkata and Ahmedabad.
🎙 Coworking conversations.
Alyssa Pressler and Garrett Tichy discuss the state of things at hygge coworking on the Zero to Ten podcast.
Jamie Russo and Bryan Adams discuss how coworking spaces should think about their Employer Value Proposition (EVP).
Elinor Potts chats to Samantha Hulls on the importance of facilitating events and bringing people together for impactful learning and working on the Out of Hours with Not9to5 podcast.
Bernie Mitchell and Jamie Dundas discuss the impact of the pandemic on London’s flexible workspaces.
📆 Coworking events.
👋 Discuss this newsletter.
Feb 11: Join other TWIC readers in discussing this week’s newsletter, the stories I shared and the trends they may represent.
🌎 The Coworking Alliance Summit.
Feb 16: The Coworking Alliance Summit returns to hold space for space operators leading, or looking to start, coworking alliances locally or across the globe.
🥃 PropTech LDN Happy Hour.
Feb 23: The next PropTech LDN meetup date is set, and open for all interested in technology for coworking, offices, retail, residential and everything in-between.
🗺 Convo: Get your website right.
Feb 25: The next Coworking Convo dives into getting your coworking website right.
🤯 Technology. Behaviour. Data.
Mar 31: TBD ‘Espérance is focused on expectations of the future. Hear trends and get insights from The Economist, VCs, Founders, Neuroscientists, New York Times bestselling experts and more. Use coupon TWIC25 to get 25% off your virtual passes.
💼 Coworking jobs.
Find or post coworking jobs for free here.
