I came across two seemingly contradicting news this week. On was on CNN business titled “London’s rental market has become a ‘nightmare.’” and the other on This is Money titled: British office space plummets by a record amount as firms adapt to hybrid working and a refurbishment boom takes out desks.
According to the first article “London’s rental market has become a ‘nightmare.’” The average monthly room rent price has skyrocketed during the past year.
However, according to the second article, about 1.8 million square metres of workspace was no longer being utilised in the year ending March 2022.
About 1.8 million square metres of workspace was no longer being utilised in the year ending March 2022, according to legal firm Boodle Hatfield, the biggest drop since it began measuring the data over two decades ago.
Half of the ten local authorities that saw the greatest reduction in office capacity were London boroughs, the largest being the City of Westminster, which lost 194,000 square metres in total.
So what is happening exactly? How can the same city be a nightmare for home tenants who struggle to find affordable and decent accommodation while at the same time so much office space is left unutilized?
Well the answer is simple: Remote Working. The post-pandemic return-to-office never fully materialized, office attendance is at a critical low, hybrid working prevails only where fully-remote doesn’t and, frankly, everyone wants a bigger home and no-one wants an empty office. One of the biggest advantages and needs for the office space is the need for in-person collaboration. However, with office attendance at 1.5 days/week, many employees visit the office only to be engaged in zoom meetings with their home-working colleagues.
So what does that mean for the property market and for the future-of-work?
The property market is already adapting, albeit slowly, and we will see mid-town office building being transformed into spacious apartments. In the meantime, house prices will remain high in the city center and in the surrounding suburbs. Organizations will reduce their office space to account for office attendance, expect hot-desking to become the norm.
As for the future-of-work? Unless organizations embrace the new normal, the hybrid model will collapse. According to a recent Gallup survey, the current hybrid models have some advantages for the employees but serious challenges for the organizations. Furthermore, it will make no sense to have 2x+ workspace redundancy for each employee (one home-workspace, one office-workspace + the occasional coworking space) when the actual work is performed mostly at home.
What organizations need is a new in-person collaborative model in the age of hybrid working. And this is where Coremoting comes in. Coremoting brings in-person collaboration at home. By using the Coremoting platform, employees having ample home-office space submit host offers to “invite” their colleagues and spend a working day together in the comfort of the host’s home-office space. Corresponding employees requiring a space to work and trying to avoid a long commute, their noisy apartment or the empty office submit guest requests. The Coremoting intelligent platform matches the host offers with the guest requests and generates Coremoting sessions, communicated to the host, to the guest and to the organization.
In-person collaboration is guaranteed, workspace flexibility is enhanced, employees’ mental health is boosted and real estate is finally balanced.