The recent European Coworking Conference was hosted by two coworking spaces, Club Office and Betahaus. Both of these are very large compared to most coworking facilities.
Betahaus is housed in a 4 story building and has a cafe, several floors of open coworking space and a big events space on the top floor. I didn't find out their exact size, but my guess is they have around 10,000 square feet.
Club Office is even bigger. It's a 9 story building with over 80,000 square feet housing multiple coworking spaces, a restaurant, events spaces, traditional office space and even hotel rooms. The building is so big and so much is going on it's a bit overwhelming.
To put this in perspective, most coworking facilities are between 1500 and 5000 square feet and most have fewer than 60 members.
Here in the U.S., WeWork has established large coworking facilities in New York and will soon open a large facility in San Francisco. They just secured 74,000 square feet in a NY building and their SF location will have around 50,000 square feet. Like Club Office, WeWork is a hybrid with coworking spaces mixed in with more traditional office space and capable of hosting hundreds of members.
We think the emergence of Big Coworking is an important development for the coworking movement. It's hard to see how the industry and movement could scale and serve a large segment of the potential market with just small spaces.
After all, even if there were 11,000 U.S. coworking spaces - roughly the number of U.S. Starbucks - with 50 members, they would only be serving 550,000 workers. This is less than 1/2 of 1% of the U.S. workforce and less than 4% of the number of independent workers.
While we believe small spaces will continue to thrive, larger spaces are going to be required for coworking to reach the mainstream. Larger spaces provide alternative and potentially more lucrative business models, appeal to and tap into the real estate industy, and will make corporations more comfortable with coworking.
The rise of Big Coworking is yet another signal that coworking is at a growth inflection point.
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