Can commercial real estate move at the speed of business? North America Market Summary

While the pandemic heightened the importance of office scalability and agility forcing businesses to rethink their commercial real estate strategies, it also brought the focus back to the employee. In the post-pandemic world, employees will become consumers of office space forcing HR, IT and CRE to create an engaging space that meets the employees needs. The inherent agility of the flexible workspace industry makes it ideally placed to help businesses create not only an appealing, interactive workspaces but it is an optimal solution for real estate portfolio to drive efficiencies, cost reductions, and sustainability.

In our newest report, “How can commercial real estate move at the speed of business?” Instant takes an in-depth look at the impact of the pandemic across the US and Canada with the goal of answering the question: is adoption of flexible workspaces the key to enabling commercial real estate to catch up to the needs of modern businesses?

Key Highlights:

• As demand for agility increased over the year, uncertainty in the market created a tough environment for agile workspace providers and increased competition for new occupiers.
• After taking a dip in the early days of the pandemic, demand increased by 21% from the first half of 2020 to the second. As some providers struggled to stay afloat, both supply and the average cost per desk from 2019 to 2020, decreased by 2% and 8% respectively.
• Signs are looking more positive as the second half of 2020 is showing a strong and consistent return to growing demand levels. The need for greater flexibility going forward will not only drive cost efficiencies but also right-size portfolios into increased geographic diversity.
• Landlords are now seeing greater opportunity in flexible real estate- this activity is expected to drive the second phase of growth within flex, pushing the industry above 300 million sq ft by 2025.