The importance of being flexible in the current office market

Yotam Alroy talks flexible office and the struggles of starting when the subsector was relatively unknown.

July 31, 2019Real Estate

Yotam Alroy is the co-founder and current Chief of Business Development at Mindspace, a leading co-working space provider that’s active in multiple locations across the world in 15 major cities. We caught up with him to talk about his thoughts and predictions on the current coworking market. 


What is your vision for Mindspace’s future?

Mindspace started in 2014, with 10,000 square ft in Tel Aviv and it was full within 2 weeks. This was at a time when coworking was relatively unheard of, but with all the explanations and persuasions we managed to become very successful in Israel. Since then we decided to go abroad with the Mindspace brand, and today we operate at 30 different locations in 7 countries. 
In terms of the future, we have plans to explore in every country we operate in; depending on maturities of assets of course.


What’s the split between your different tenants?

One of the things that I’m most proud of is that we have loads of different companies using Mindspace. So we range from some really small yet exciting startups all the way up to supplying hundreds of workstations to companies such as Microsoft, Samsung and Barclays Bank. About 40% are large enterprises, and the rest is split between SMEs and startups.


In your view, who is the future occupier?

Essentially, everyone. It’ll be the tenants that enjoy the flexible leases and the professional workplace, but also the amenities and decor that lend heavily towards the attraction and retention of their employees.


Mindspace operates in multiple countries around the world. How do the markets compare?

I think the coworking business is more city oriented than country oriented. Even in London, one part of the city performs and behaves very differently from another part. So they are all changing rapidly, and what separates these coworking brands is how quickly you can adapt and change to suit every type of situation and tenant.


Do you feel as though the sub-sector has the strength to survive the downturn?

Of course, the sub-sector is very diverse and all of these space providers have very different models and approaches. I believe that the strong and well-positioned companies absolutely have the strength to survive in a potential downturn. When we move to new cities we look to set up in prime locations for this as well as transportation access, proximity to restaurants and other amenities.
So, if a company is strong and prepares effectively, not only will they survive a potential downturn but it might even provide them with new and exciting opportunities to take advantage of.

 

For more information and further discussion on the current UK flexible office market, Europe GRI takes place on 11-12 September in Paris and GRI Offices takes place on the 19-20 November in London.

 

Article by Matt Harris