Coworking in explosive growth - forecast predicts global doubling of spaces

Besides the number of global coworking spaces, the number of coworkers is also expected to explode from 1.74 million by the end of 2017 to a most impressive total of 5.1 million users in 2022.

The significant forecast is delivered by US business portal Small Business Labs in association with the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC).

The expected growth in the number of global coworking spaces crosses an average increase of 16.1 percent in each of the next five years up to 2022.

The explosive growth rate in the global number of future coworking users the forecast estimates to hit 24.2 percent per year within the same period.

Breakthrough

"If the forecast should appear to be close, the ´revolution´of coworking will face a fantastic, definitive breakthrough," Global Relationship Manager Martin Roerholt, MatchOffice.com, comments.

"The optimistic growth rates of the US forecast are considerably higher than our MatchOffice forecasts, but this may be caused by the fact that our data are mainly based on the movements of the European market and less of the American." 

The number of coworking users will predictly explode from 1.74 million by the end of 2017 to impressive 5.1 million coworkers in 2022.        Fotos: Hanahaus, Palo Alto

The very significant forecast from Small Business Labs and GCUC are based on the fact that also Asia included India and in particular China now has embraced the popular coworking concept and alreday today represents the largest coworking market of the world.

On the well-developed coworking markets of the US and Europe, growth is expected to run at a slightly quieter pace - around 15 percent a year.

The Millennials

Especially rapidly rising prices of commercial city properties have accelerated needs for greater flexibility and still more companies are motivated to prioritize flexible coworking solutions.

This trend is expected to accelerate over the next five years as companies of different kinds are waiting to settle their long-term leases in favor of those flexible solutions that the coworking concept is offering.

Also the millennials as well as the new work habits of young startups - generated by the digital explosion and the SoMe boom - are highly contributing to increase the needs of mostly very trendy coworking environments.

"Finally, business brokers and the real estate industry have seriously begun to see and identify heavy investment potentials in the new popular coworking environments, and this fact increases the interest and exposure of the coworking spaces.

In future, we will also see a rising number of smaller coworking spaces, and in particular this development will drive future growth.

The market´s current movements are economically driven by the very large locations - for example, WeWork, which very often establishes multi-storey coworking environments. They intend to scale up to minimize the average marginal costs per membership," Martin Roerholt adds.

Time trends

Within the last year even very large companies have started to focus on the many advantages of belonging to social, creative and innovative coworking environments.

"Time trends show that even the biggest wellknown enterprises nowadays establish their own coworking spaces within their own well-established walls or rent exernal spaces for selected departments or groups of their staff.

As still more people are able to work remotely and as freelancers, they would rather work quite close to their homes to save daily hours of transportation. Also this movement is going to open up another new market," Martin Roerholt expects. ●

Read more:
Smallbizlabs.com: Global Coworking Forecast
Entrepreneur.com: What Will Coworking Spaces Look Like in 2020
Cnbc.com: Coworking Spaces Aren´t Just for Entrepreneurs Anymore