Coworking players drive office space demand in 2019

Demand for office space from IT/ITeS sector and co-working operators has driven leasing of workspace to an all-time high in 2019 at 60.6 million sq ft across eight major cities, according to global property consultant Knight Frank. Fresh supply of office spaces also surged by 56% in 2019 at 61.3 million sq ft last year. As per the latest Knight Frank data, co-working operators leased around 13 per cent of the total office space transacted in 2019. Their share in total absorption was only 5 per cent in 2017. Knight Frank India reported that over 8 million sq ft office space was leased by co-working players. Knight Frank tracks property markets of Mumbai, national capital region (Delhi-NCR) Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Kolkata Interestingly, the share of co-working segment was higher than manufacturing sector that contributed only 12 per cent to the total office space leasing in 2019. NCR market saw leasing of 1.53 mn sq ft of co-working space in 2019 by coworking players, up 17 per cent from the previous year. . "Gurugram was the preferred location for co-working occupiers with 66% of the total transacted co-working space taken up in locations such as Golf Course Extension Road and in Gurugram," Knight Frank said. There are more than 250 coworking operators across major cities. WeWork, CoWrks, OYO, Avanta India, India Accelerator, Smartworks, Awfis, Regus, Skootr are major players in this rising segment along with search engine players like findmycowork.com and few more which have been fueling the growth of co-working office spaces by provisioning customised sales packages and generating queries across the country. The demand for coworking space has risen from corporates over the years. Earlier, the requirement for flexible workspace was from startups and freelancers.