The 2019 U.S. version of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference Series (GCUC) happened last week in Denver. Over 500 attendees showed up to discuss the state of the coworking industry and learn from one another.
It was clear from the discussions and presentations that the state of the coworking industry is excellent.
The industry continues to grow at a rapid pace, niche and independent coworking spaces are thriving, and the big coworking chains continue to expand.
One thing that caught our eye was the number of attendees from coworking spaces serving new industry segments and vertical markets.
A good example is Palletized, a coworking and cowarehousing space that provides logistics services and warehouse space in addition to office space. This vertical market is quite large and because of ecommerce, growing quite rapidly. And now there's a coworking option for this industry.
Coworking rapid growth has been driven by 3 waves of customers. The first group were freelancers and independent workers who were coworking's first customer base. Quickly following them were startups and micro businesses. More recently large corporations have embraced coworking.
Going forward we think all three of these groups will continue to drive coworking's growth. But we also see a fourth wave emerging. This wave will be driven by niche and vertical market growth (like Palletized) and geographic expansion.
Coworking started in the urban cores of large cities. But now it's diffusing across geographies into the suburbs, smaller cities and even into rural areas.
These areas, BTW, are the home to most Americans. About 98 million Americans live in urban core counties. But 175 million live in suburbs and small metro areas and 46 million live in the nation's rural counties.
This means coworking is just starting to expand into markets where 2/3rds of Americans live and well over half work.
Bottom line - the industry has a lot of room to grow.
Allwork's articles GCUC 2019: What Coworking Members Really Want and GCUC 2019: Is the Coworking Market Saturated? - quick answer - no - nicely covers several of the panels and related discussions.
We "borrowed" the picture above from Allwork's GCUC coverage.
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