How do you design flexible real estate spaces to respond to business needs?

1 Benefits of flexibility

Flexibility in real estate can offer several advantages, such as decreasing costs and risks by bypassing long-term leases or ownership of unnecessary assets. You can also increase agility and responsiveness by adjusting your space to match growth, contraction, or diversification strategies. Moreover, you can enhance productivity and innovation by creating spaces that foster collaboration, creativity, and well-being. Additionally, you can attract and retain talent by offering spaces that suit different work styles, preferences, and needs. Furthermore, you can improve sustainability and resilience by optimizing your space utilization and reducing your environmental impact.

2 Types of flexibility

When designing real estate, you can incorporate different types of flexibility, depending on your objectives, constraints, and preferences. Spatial flexibility allows you to modify the layout, configuration, or functionality of your space; temporal flexibility allows you to vary the duration or frequency of your space occupancy; geographical flexibility enables you to relocate or distribute your space across different locations; and organizational flexibility allows you to share or exchange your space with other entities. Examples include movable walls, modular furniture, short-term leases, subleases, remote work, satellite offices, joint ventures, partnerships, and platforms.

3 Design principles

Designing flexible real estate spaces that can respond to your business needs requires following certain design principles. You must assess your current and future needs, evaluate the options and trade-offs, choose the optimal mix and balance, and implement the design while monitoring performance. To understand your space requirements, you must consider growth projections, market trends, customer expectations, and competitive pressures. Comparing and contrasting different types of flexibility is also important to consider their costs, benefits, and risks. Selecting the best combination of flexibility that meets your needs, goals, and constraints while aligning with your vision, values, and brand is key. Lastly, you must execute your design plan to ensure your space is functional, comfortable, and adaptable; then measure and review your space performance and outcomes such as efficiency, productivity, innovation, and satisfaction.

4 Best practices

Designing flexible real estate spaces successfully requires adopting best practices to overcome potential challenges and pitfalls. It's important to involve stakeholders, such as employees, customers, partners, and suppliers, to understand their needs and preferences. Leveraging technology tools and systems can enable flexibility by providing insights, automation, connectivity, and security. Additionally, aligning organizational culture and policies can facilitate flexibility by promoting trust, collaboration, autonomy, and accountability. Experimentation and learning from initiatives is also necessary to test different solutions, collect feedback and data, make improvements, and adjust accordingly.

5 Examples of flexibility

For inspiration and to illustrate how real estate spaces can be adapted to business needs, here are examples of how other businesses have used flexibility in their real estate design. Airbnb has created dynamic and adaptable workspaces with local art, furniture, and materials, as well as movable and modular elements. Netflix utilizes temporal flexibility to adjust its space occupancy according to production cycles and schedules, such as through short-term leases, subleases, and co-working spaces. Shopify takes advantage of geographical flexibility by distributing its space across different locations and regions with remote work, satellite offices, and hub-and-spoke models. WeWork employs organizational flexibility to share and exchange its space with other entities through joint ventures, partnerships, and platforms for community building and service offering.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?