Orlando drawing national chains to expanding co-working market
When Steven Jones started his own digital marketing company in January, he wanted to continue working in downtown Orlando.
But without a big budget, he couldn’t afford to lease an office, so he rented out a desk at Catalyst co-working space, two floors above his former employer.
“It was nice coming to work in the same building,” said Jones, 32, founder of Rise Inc. “I still walk to work, and I’m surrounded by like-minded creative talent.”
Downtown Orlando’s co-working market is maturing, offering many options for a new way to work — sharing common spaces, meeting rooms, technology and coffee bars, while networking with other tenants for sales and referrals on a casual, daily basis. National chains are
opening offices in the region.
“We see Orlando as a booming market,” said Jon Pirtle, CEO of Nashville-based E|SPACES, which just announced a new location in downtown Orlando.
E|SPACES will lease an entire floor of the planned Church Street Plaza office tower at the corner of South Garland Avenue and West South Street. Another chain, Pipeline Workspaces based in Miami, plans to lease an entire floor at 20 N. Orange Ave. That’s in addition to a dozen co-working spaces already operating.
The cost of co-working in Orlando is fairly even across the market. A temporary pass is usually about $25 a day. A membership to use a desk in the open area and the amenities once a week is about $100 per month or $200 a month to use it five days a week. A dedicated desk where a computer and other items are kept is about $300 or more a month. The upper range, for larger team offices that lock up at night, can run up to $1,500 a month.
Some of the existing spaces have yet to fill up and prosper. But the growing number of co-working spaces doesn’t necessarily mean competition. As bigger players arrive in Orlando, they will also bring their own business ties and bigger marketing budgets.
“The office-space model in America is changing in general,” Pirtle said. “It just doesn’t make sense for your salesperson to mess with the copier machine that broke, or the coffee machine, instead of sales … we handle all that stuff.”
To help raise their profile locally, co-working spaces are forming the Orlando Coworking Alliance. They plan to educate people about co-working and possibly coordinate an effort to advertise and seek city support for co-working, said Dennis Pape, founder of Catalyst.
Nationally, Orlando is just catching up to the trend that has swept through bigger cities. And coworking is not just for millennials; it’s a trend in corporate America.
A good example is Priceline, which has employees at Pipeline in Coral Gables. And Cisco has employees at Catalyst in downtown Orlando. A relatively new space called Hub 925 in Dr. Phillips is sometimes used by creative contractors at Disney World, Universal Orlando and other local attractions.
A recent report from real estate firm CBRE said co-working in the U.S. is growing by about 20 percent annually, and more than 40 percent of corporations already use some type of flexible office solutions. Another survey by Jones Lange LaSalle said by 2030, up to 30 percent of all office space will be, in some form, flexible.
Orlando is not yet in the top tier of co-working cities. One of the biggest chains in co-working, WeWork, hasn’t opened here yet. In 2016, JLL ranked Orlando No. 31 for total square feet in co-working, behind cities such as St. Louis and Fort Lauderdale, but ahead of Tampa and San Antonio.
Co-working is a tool that realestate firms are using to help fill up buildings. Bringing in entrepreneurs often means they grow and want to stay. It also makes the building an attractive place for other entrepreneurs and small tech startups, because of the networking that goes on. That’s what happened at Colab in downtown Orlando — apparently the first coworking space in the metro area, having been founded in 2008.
The next space to open was when JLL was trying to market a long dormant building downtown, the Church Street Exchange. It offered a large space on the ground floor to local tech entrepreneurs. That became Canvs, the first not-for-profit coworking space in the city. Tech companies like PlanSource and PowerDMS soon moved in to fill other floors.
Many co-working spaces, such as Canvs and Catalyst, offer regular speakers and events to mentor and assist entrepreneurs.
“I like the co-working space because it has a lot of networking,” said Leonardo Rivera, who runs an advertising firm from Colab, where he also works as a community manager. “There’s a lot of different types of businesses, and you can bounce ideas off each other.”