How to Survive in the Era of Bigger Office Supply, Smaller Demand and Short Leases?

We can see hotels repurposing their rooms as offices and the same thing happening to retail spaces. Corporates dread multi-year leases and many are considering decreasing their real estate footprint, while decentralising it. All of that seems to be spelling a birth of truly flexible working and some very troubling news to office tower owners, particularly those who don’t change their leasing habits.

Work from Anywhere

Since the dawn of laptop and mobile phone, it was more habit than need that carried us to sit at desks in offices every day. The time when the archives and best technology could be found at the office, are long gone. And for those of us who like presenteeism – the share of work that can be controlled by looking at a person working is at all-time low.

Some very good reasons to show up remained, of course. We’ve been coming to offices to meet people, to exchange knowledge and those of us who have kids or small apartments did so to focus. Offices will still need to be there to provide all of those.

What has the biggest experiment in flexible working in history (COVID-19) proved is that we can be very effective using Zoom, Slack, email and phones. Even when there’s a vaccine, I don’t believe there’ll be coming back from that – people enjoyed it too much, they proved to be as productive and CFOs realised that maybe there’s space for savings in real estate.

When people will come, they’ll want to book a desk or an office, choose who they want to sit next to and be able to invite others to come – we’ve developed Social Desk Booking module just for that.

Turn on the Flex

Where does it leave the office asset managers? Well, it seems that they need to get ready to compete with a variety of asset classes who turn their spaces into offices. They also need to meet higher expectations of office workers, providing a much better building experience. And finally, they need to be prepared to meet the demand for flexibility coming from corporates.

The good news is that they’re the ones experienced in creating spaces for work. The tough one is that they’re lacking tech and services to make those spaces truly great. And they’ll need technology to turn some of the building floors to flexible operations, enabling effective online leasing, automated invoicing and a system to market the meeting rooms and services.

We’ve created this kind of tooling not with COVID-19 in mind, but believing that that’s where the world has to go.

It’s time to make the experience of going to work exciting again. We have a one in a generation chance to eliminate 5-days of endless commute, improve well-being and life quality of billions, while enabling corporates to be more innovative due to increased flexibility of their space operations.