Co-Working Spaces: The Future of Real Estate And Its Pros And Cons

Co-working space is a newly coined form of a business model emerging in real state space across the world. It is addressed by several other names like on-demand workplaces, shared offices, etc. This workspace model has gained rapid importance due to spiraling real estate costs. It is also very effective for companies who do not assign themselves to any long term lease obligations and instead proceed to have a flexible cost structure. Some of the trends of shared offices are mentioned below: Common Trends for Co-Working Spaces:

• Cost: This method is mainly for start-up companies. Most of the startup companies these days are tech advanced which means they have offices with facilities such as video conferencing, VOIP enabled phones, leased internet lines, etc. Although, installing such facilities is expensive for such companies who are strapped for cash. Therefore, this method comes useful for economically and operationally feasible plug and play model for office space. For startup companies, it’s more expensive on monthly basis whereas bigger companies find this model to be cheaper.
• Infrastructure: Co-working spaces allow the cost of operation to reduce without affecting the infrastructure quality. Generally, these types of shared workspaces have conference rooms and even video conferencing facilities.
• Travel Convenience: Many multinational companies opt for these methods because they do not require fully fledged offices. Thus, they don’t compromise on the quality of office space or the facilities they provide for their employees. It is for this reason that shared working spaces are a viable alternative.
• Shorter Commute Times: In big cities a lot of time for employees is wasted travelling to and from work, which might result in spending extra hour’s .Therefore it needs to be eliminated. One of the ways is to start using shared work places wherein workers should be allowed to log into their nearest shared workplace center.
• Flexibility: Increase in size of an organization might result in logistic problems in traditional offices. This might result in renting an entirely new office. However, with shared workplaces, this isn’t the case. Organizations can rent exactly as much space needed for extra workers as much as the time needed.

Problems faced in shared workspaces:

• Cost Allocation: Allocating costs on a shared workplace is very difficult to compute. In a fully-fledged office, a company has many expenses like electricity bills, property taxes, etc. However in shared workplaces, these costs can be separated which results in disagreements. While some companies opt for head count to allocate expenses other companies might not feel the same. Developers try to circumvent these problems by building with least prices. Although, still it might end up causing wastage of resources and might even lead to dispute in many cases.
• Privacy: Although being cheaper and providing better infrastructure, most companies won’t feel comfortable to proceed to locating their operations to shared workplaces. The reason behind this is simply because there is a high risk of data or other intellectual property being stolen. Also, if the strategy gets leaked and falls into the hands of the competitors, it might result in losing competitive edge.

The future of workplaces is a mixing of two models. However, high-end tasks which might need sensitive data and strategy information may continue to remain within the grasps of leased workspaces.