With demand for coworking options doubling since 2021, IWG, the world’s largest provider of flexible workspaces, has seen its revenues reach a 30-year high, increasing 24% year-over-year.
Flexible workspace currently represents 1.9 per cent of commercial real estate and some analysts forecast it could rise to 30 per cent by 2030. Co-working location expansion is also being fuelled by companies looking at their real estate footprints differently and rationalizing their portfolios as a cost-saving measure.
In downtown Vancouver, the office real estate market is witnessing historic vacancy rates — an all-time high of 12%. Traditional office space has been greatly impacted by what’s been coined as the “Great Lease Resignation” by IWG, with companies downsizing their own footprint in the big cities and shifting to more flexible space to accommodate the new hybrid ways of working, providing their teams with a network of locations to work from.
Spaces, which is part of the IWG network, has shown no signs of slowing down in the Lower Mainland. The company recently opened two new Spaces locations encompassing nearly 100,000 square feet recently opened in Vancouver and Surrey.
– The 40,000-square-foot Spaces West 8th Ave. in Vancouver’s Broadway Corridor, a medical and government corridor that’s on the boundary of the Mount Pleasant technology hub opened in May.
– The 51,500-square-foot Spaces King George Hub will be the anchor tenant of King George Hub, a mixed-use development at 9850 King George Blvd. in Surrey, B.C.
