North Texas packs a punch in the coworking industry.
The Dallas-Fort Worth metro was the second-largest coworking market in the country during the fourth quarter, despite experiencing a slight decrease in available coworking space, Bisnow reported.
The number of coworking venues in DFW stood at 286 at the end of the year, just behind Los Angeles, which led the nation with 292 locations, according to Yardi Systems subsidiary CoworkingCafe. Washington, D.C., held third place with 277 venues followed by Manhattan with 273 locations.
DFW’s coworking space inventory ended the year at 5.2 million square feet, marking a 1 percent decrease from the previous quarter. The average venue size dropped by 3 percent, now standing at just over 18,000 square feet.
“There’s a lot of entrepreneurs here, so you get a lot of these mom-and-pop coworking spaces instead of the national brands,” Nadim Ahmed, owner of two Venture X locations in DFW, told the outlet.
National brands typically operate larger coworking spaces because they don’t face the same funding challenges as smaller providers, he said.
The national median price for open workspaces fell by $1 to $149 per unit, but DFW saw a nearly 33 percent increase, ending the year at $199. That’s due to population growth and increased demand, Ahmed said.
Some have speculated that return-to-office mandates could negatively affect the coworking sector, but Ahmed disagrees.
“When they return back to office, it’s only going to help coworking,” he told the outlet. “The difference now will be that workspace has become a consumer’s market. In the past, it was the employers who were picking, but now it’s employees who are going to pick.”
Return-to-office could boost demand for coworking space as companies seek flexible solutions to changing workforce needs and economic conditions, said Doug Ressler, Yardi’s manager of business intelligence.
Major transactions in the coworking sector included commercial real estate giant CBRE acquiring the remaining 60 percent stake of Industrious and Yardi Systems taking a majority stake in WeWork after its bankruptcy restructuring.
— Andrew Terrell
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