India Flex workspace predictions 2021

• Field sales staff check into flex workspaces whenever they wish to, across every city in the country, using one national access pass
• Employees use a mix of work from home and work near home strategies to maximize productivity
• Teams working on complex, time sensitive projects use flex spaces for more effective F2F meetings
• Smaller regional teams work from more cost-effective flex spaces
• Tech companies with non-existent regional offices use flex spaces for spokes co-located with their head office in the same city

As a national marketplace for flex workspaces, we had witnessed increasing experimentation by enterprises with the flex space product but of late, we have observed a wholehearted embrace of the product by MNC’s. The Covid pandemic has acted as an accelerant for our industry, forcing the distillation of years of careful adoption by enterprises into a half a year.

Razor sharp focus on optimizing the occupant experience: What is the holy grail for owners of CRE? How do commercial office space providers go about optimizing their returns from a CRE portfolio?

• Brand commercial, traditionally leased space as a flex workspace that earns you more per seat.
• Then, through the right digital visibility, attract enterprise demand that takes up a large proportion of your seats, has lower turnover, forms the base component of your demand.
• Bid out your remaining seats to fractional demand at even higher rates per day.
• And then use cutting edge, occupant experience focused software to optimize your customer retention ratios.

Voila. Holy grail achieved.

Flex workspaces naturally offer higher earnings and margins for flex space operators versus traditionally leased spaces. With the recent pandemic, not only has enterprise demand taken off, but operators have also found a renewed focus on optimizing the occupant experience in a bid to improve profitability and stay afloat. We expect this focus on occupant experiences to persist after the pandemic because flex space operators would have realized that every occupant retained for every additional month means lower selling, marketing, brokerage expenses, and higher revenues.

Providers will find new ways to differentiate their offerings: The current discovery process for flex workspaces comprises of searching basis location and price. However, the addition of exponentially more stock month on month will force flex space operators to start differentiating themselves in unique ways as they all compete to rank high for digital search results. Think filters enabling the demand side to discover workspaces that are:

• Women friendly, environment friendly, have engaged communities etc.
• Focused on providing office space for specific stages of the company lifecycle, from 0 to 1, till steady state management
• Exclusively for senior, mid, junior management, and the execution layers

We expect the development of such differentiation to enable better matching of digital search traffic with workspaces, resulting in reduced conversion times for leads and better conversion ratios for operators.

This trend will also accelerate once operators realize that flex workspace differentiation is the only way to compete on the basis of value versus pricing + location, and enhance consumer price insensitivity. This should help the industry realize pricing gains of 25-50% on a per seat basis, uplift profitability, and accelerate supply addition rates.

Disclaimer: The views, suggestions and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Forbes India journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.