Geekdom, other sites beginning to reopen
Geekdom, the downtown coworking office and event space, will reopen June 8 after closing in mid-March amid the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown.
Members at Geekdom will be asked to check their temperature at home before coming to the location, as well as to wash their hands when they arrive.
Geekdom also will ask members to wear masks in all of its community areas, and to remain 6 feet apart from one another, including in private conference rooms.
“We know that there is a particular energy when it comes to human interaction, developing ideas, and the nature of coworking, so we wanted to get the doors reopened in an efficient and equally safe and healthful manner,” Geekdom CEO Charles Woodin said. “Members of the community have been chomping at the bit to get back to work safely.”
The kitchen and vending machines will be closed, and so will the communal coffee area. Geekdom members also only will be allowed to use the space from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays so custodians have adequate time to sanitize the office.
Other coworking spaces in San Antonio have reopened with similar guidelines.
VenturePoint, which operates three coworking spaces around the city, reopened the
locations but is requiring members to wear face masks and have their temperatures checked.
The company said it’s performing a hospitalgrade disinfection of the space once a week, and is barring use of the facilities’ kitchens for now.
10BitWorks, a coworking space in Southtown, said it would reopen May 20 with similar social distancing guidelines and restrictions in place.
WeWork, the global coworking giant, agreed to lease a space in the Grant and Kress building downtown that’s currently being renovated by the local development firm GrayStreet Partners.
The WeWork space appeared set to open later this year, but it’s not clear how COVID-19 has affected WeWork’s plans.
Neither GrayStreet nor WeWork responded to a request for comment on the status of the project.
Even as the Texas economy gradually restarts, it’s uncertain how demand for coworking offices has changed since mid-March, when people shifted en masse to working from home.
Coworking offices generally feature open-area layouts that members can access with a “hot desk” membership, which typically allows them to use any of the communal workspaces.
Pricier memberships can grant workers their own dedicated desk, or even an office.
Still, even with extensive sanitation, it’s likely that many workers will choose to continue working from home over going back to their coworking office. Others will seek places they can get more space and come into contact with fewer people.
That could spell trouble for the coworking industry, says a report published in late April by Jones Lang Lasalle, a Chicago-based commercial real estate company.
“We now expect that recently trending arrangements of benching, shared desks, and hoteling stations will be carefully evaluated and potentially shifted to provide a greater allocation of space per employee,” JLL analysts wrote.
“With people moving in and out of coworking hot desks on a regular workday, one seat could have been shared by multiple people,” they wrote. “It may change the appeal of working alongside strangers, and in unassigned seats in any office environment, at least in the short term.”
While it likely will be more challenging for coworking spaces to fully reopen compared with more traditional offices, people won’t want to work from home forever, said Clare Flesher, managing director of NAI Partners, a commercial real estate firm based in San Antonio.
“At the end of the day, people need a place to go,” Flesher said. “Especially for something like Geekdom and places like that where it’s designed to have this interaction and collaboration between startups and second-round companies, I think they like that.”
Any lull in occupancy at local coworking spaces isn’t likely to last long, Flesher said.
Flesher said his San Antonio office real estate business has remained active through the shutdown. Just one client pulled out of a deal that was in place before the pandemic, he said.
Prior to the city’s stay-athome order, office vacancy in San Antonio had been declining for most of the past decade.
The vacancy rate for all San Antonio-area offices dropped from over 19 percent in 2013 to 14 percent during the first three months of 2020. Downtown, the office vacancy rate is below 10 percent, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate firm.
Even with U.S. Economic downturn, the unique nature of the pandemic could “result in an unusually swift recovery” in the coming months, the CBRE quarterly report states.
“This will be paired with pent-up private demand that could help the U.S. economy return to growth by year-end and drive stronger than previously expected growth in 2021,” the report stated.
Coworking offices generally feature open-area layouts that members can access with a “hot desk” membership, which typically allows them to use any of the communal workspaces.