Suburban homes and retail are the new budding office hotspot
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Real estate companies are turning suburban residences and commercial spaces into offices, betting that the pandemic will increase the demand for workspaces in these neighborhoods.
With many Americans working from home and planning to continue even after the pandemic, some startups and owners believe these employees will want a place to work beyond their living room. They offer these workers a local alternative: furnished offices, bookable by the day or by the month and accessible on foot from their homes.
One of those companies is Daybase, a New York-based startup founded by former WeWork executives Joel Steinhaus and Doug Chambers. It launches this week and plans to open its first locations in northern New Jersey this year, eyeing suburban towns like Hoboken and Montclair.
A proliferation of new office space in the suburbs could help fill empty commercial spaces. They could also further blur the distinction between residential and commercial neighborhoods and help remake metropolitan areas.
Today, most cities are built around central business districts designed for commuters. But some planners suggest cities could become more decentralized, with more and smaller offices in the suburbs. This would allow more people to work and shop without ever having to travel far.
Daybase said it is turning retail space into furnished office space averaging around 5,000 square feet. Customers can use a shared working lounge for a monthly subscription of $ 50 and pay extra for private workspaces and meeting rooms. Mr Chambers believes the model will appeal to homeowners because offices can attract new customers to suburban retail businesses who otherwise wouldn’t be there during the day. The company is backed by venture capitalists Company Ventures and Good Friends.
Daybase does not want to replace the company’s headquarters, but to create an additional network of smaller offices, said Steinhaus, who was, among other things, chief of staff to former WeWork chief executive Adam Neumann. , and responsible for the strategic initiatives of the company. âThere won’t be a switch that will be flipped and we’re all going to come back to some normalcy,â he said.
Large apartment owners are also experimenting with furnished offices. AvalonBay Communities Inc.,
which owns more than 85,000 rental apartments across the United States, surveyed its tenants last summer and found that many wanted a place to work from home. Now, the company is launching private workspaces that residents can book monthly, an offer it calls Second Space.
âIt would be kind of a supplement, just like you could pay extra for a parking space or storage space,â said Matt Birenbaum, chief investment officer. The first location, on the ground floor of a newly constructed apartment building in Monrovia, a half-hour drive east of Los Angeles, is slated to open at the end of the summer.
Residential Equity,
another large apartment owner, has long had conference rooms in his buildings, but is now looking to add more smaller private rooms that tenants can use for work, said chief investment officer Alec Brackenridge.
San Francisco-based startup Codi, meanwhile, is putting desks right in homes. The company acts as an Airbnb for offices, allowing users to rent spare rooms or garages to businesses as work space during the day. Codi has around 500 listings in a number of U.S. cities, said CEO Christelle Rohaut, who founded the company in 2018 while studying urban planning at the University of California at Berkeley.
Workspace cloud company Coder, which is looking to sublet its Austin, Texas headquarters and go all remote, plans to relocate six employees to a Codi space in the northwest suburbs of Austin by June, said Krista Ratcliff, who is in charge of operations.
The move saves money – a Codi office costs around $ 700 per month per employee, compared to around $ 1,200 at the old headquarters – but the biggest draw is providing an escape without having to endure. Austin’s notorious traffic. Ms Ratcliff, who has two children and works from her bedroom, said she was eager to get out of the house and to an office just a 15-minute bike ride away.
âIn my life, I will never commute like I used to get downtown,â she said.
Write to Konrad Putzier at [email protected]
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