We released our 2014 to 2018 global coworking forecast last week at the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) in Kansas City.
The number of global coworking facilities has been growing quite rapidly over the last 5 years, basically doubling in number each year.
While we see this growth slowing, we still expect the number of facilities to increase at a very strong average annual growth rate of about 30% over the next 5 years.
As the chart below from our GCUC presentation shows, this growth results in over 12,000 global coworking spaces operating in 2018.
The number of coworking members is forecast to grow even faster. The reason is the number of members per coworking space is increasing. This is because:
- new spaces tend to be much larger than the first generation of coworking spaces.
- existing spaces are expanding by adding more space and more members.
- coworking facility operators have learned to optimize their space use and serve more members per square foot of space.
Because of these reasons, we're forecasting global coworking membership to grow at about 40% per year over the next 5 years and pass the 1 million member level in 2018.
We'll post more details on our coworking forecast in the coming weeks.
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