Office space latest rental commodity
Taking a page from Airbnb playbook, workspaces, parking spots, garden plots service sharing economy
LONDON — Claire Brynteson had a house, a job and a dining table that was empty once she got her three children out the door every morning.
When she received a flyer telling her she could make money by renting seats at the table to people looking for short-term office space, she jumped at the chance to list its virtues on the Spacehop website — where Airbnb meets the laptop entrepreneur.
“I wondered why perhaps it had taken so long since Airbnb has been running for so long,” Brynteson said at her home in south London. “People have for a long time been making money out of their home with guests staying over the night and paying to be there. This is a little less intrusive.”
The rise of self-employment and soaring office costs are fueling demand for shared office space in metropolitan areas, with a handful of firms renting workspace by the hour, similar to the way Airbnb offers overnight stays. Vrumi, founded in 2015, says it has 5,000 registered users and 120,000 square feet of rentable workspace across the U.K. Londonbased Spacehop joined the market last year, as did Breather, a four-yearold company that also operates in the U.S. and Canada.
It’s the latest development of the socalled sharing economy, where those looking for extra cash are generating income any way they can with the help of the internet and smartphone apps. Space itself has become a commodity, with people renting their driveways to commuters searching for parking, attics to apartment dwellers in need of storage and garden plots to those who want to grow their own tomatoes.
Boxful in Hong Kong promises to declutter your life by collecting and storing unneeded belongings. In Spain, LetMeSpace provides a marketplace to rent out anything from parking spaces to unused storage. Pubs are renting out space in the morning to people looking for peace to work, said Catherine Cottney,
manager of trends at business research firm Mintel.
“It’s the final frontier,” Cottney said. “People are recognizing the worth of space and they’re looking to maximize that.”
With an abundance of investors and a computer-literate entrepreneurial population, the U.K. is driving the trend in Europe. In Britain, platform revenues more than tripled to 850 million pounds ($1.1 billion) in the three years through 2015, according to a study by PwC. Peer-to-peer accommodation, which includes shared office space as well as overnight stays like Airbnb, accounted for 27 percent of that total. Globally, PwC estimates that revenues in the sharing economy were about $15 billion in 2015.
The move toward new workspaces dovetails with changes in the workplace itself.
Cary Cooper, an expert on workplace issues at Alliance Manchester Business School, said he’s surprised the Airbnb model didn’t come to office space sooner, and he believes it will grow as millennials seek flexibility and others seek to make a living. Recent figures from the Resolution Foundation think tank found that self-employment accounts for 45 percent of the growth in employment in Britain since 2008.