Co-working is here to stay. Beyond the sleek minimalist office aesthetics and controversial Wall Street valuations, real estate vendors cannot ignore community within co-working spaces if they want to see their co-working establishments flourish. The co-working scene has ballooned into a lucrative global industry, with an estimated 35,000 co-working spaces worldwide. It’s no longer viewed as a fad. Commercial real estate providers are in a prime position to expand in this space. However, a new perspective is required. One that combines a community-driven focus.
For real estate operators with co-working ambitions, it’s important to recognize community as the heart of a co-working space. In the 2017 Global Co-working Survey, the top three reasons for members joining a co-working space was the social and enjoyable atmosphere, social interaction and community. Coming together through shared location and interest is nothing new, but in co-working spaces, opportunities to connect and network with other members are advertised as a benefit of joining. Co-working members have more transient workplace arrangements than a traditional corporate tenant. As more co-working spaces spring up, it will create a member’s market because they will have a plethora of choices and community will likely be the deciding factor.
“Copying what’s tangible is absolutely easy,” says Marc Navarro, a co-working consultant based in Barcelona, Spain. “If space is copying yours, and we’re only 100 meters away, what’s the only difference we have?” A workspace interior can be replicated, but the community cannot.
This new co-working landscape requires real estate owners to take a customer-driven approach that puts community first, in order to succeed. The current paradigm of co-working spaces is to find a location first, then facilitate community around it which is one reason why community is not usually a top priority for real estate owners. It’s the opposite of how co-working communities first evolved.
“Some of them actually started as a community of practice before there was even a space,” says University of Michigan business professor, Gretchen Spreitzer.
However, according to Liz Elam, an early co-working space owner and founder of the Global co-working Unconference Conference, the real estate industry is a “sleeping giant” that has an important role to play in the future of co-working.
She says, “The real estate industry has an opportunity to become part of this huge global phenomenon, but the thing they’re going to have to learn, which is difficult for the real-estate industry, is that community is a vital part of co-working and if you don’t have community people won’t thrive, and your co-working space won’t thrive.”
The intangible nature of community is challenging for real estate owners to quantify. It requires a specialist combination of knowledge and nuance to navigate. “It’s hard to put a number on community. Community is something you have to build. You can’t buy it,” says Elam. Fortunately, technology is revealing insights into building co-working communities. A growing number of proptech companies have built community-driven technology to empower co-working vendors and real-estate owners with insights to cultivate and manage communities.
Equiem is a tenant management platform that engages co-working members. Its CEO, Gabrielle McMillan agrees that technology is necessary for building community. “Technology: it’s not the community itself, but it certainly plays a huge role in facilitating and activating a community and making it possible for real estate owners to provide community within their building,” she said.
Equiem helps real estate owners and community managers build a sense of community through customer insights, which is used to coordinate activities. For example, through the platform members will be able to see community events and connect with like-minded peers in the same space. Community managers can view whether these events are well attended, and build community engagement strategies based on the behaviors and patterns of members. OfficeDnD is another tech company that provides a co-working directory so members can find each other and forge connections.