Year 2022: Super High Growth Time for Managed Workspaces

With offices opening once again, there has been a lot of interest in the managed workspace sector. Realty+ Editor Sapna Srivastava speaks to Table Space Executive Director Anamika Gupta, on Table Space’s strategy to meet the growing demand. What are the reasons for more corporations now taking up managed workspaces?  The advantages of managed workspaces are multi-fold and enterprises have understood that there is tremendous merit in it. The most compelling reason is the advantage of a capex lite model for a custom designed, integrated office. In fact, industry trends show that large corporates are shifting as much as 20 percent of their overall real estate portfolio into the managed office model. The managed office model offers a lot of flexibility in terms of scaling up and scaling down, pay-as-you-go, smart office designs, and a single cheque solution across cities. What are Table Space Technologies’ strategies to tap into the growing demand post-Covid?  We have been in constant touch with our partners and enterprise clients throughout the Covid-19 situation and these learnings have helped shape our post-pandemic strategy. The mindset of corporate clients in the past one-and-a-half years towards capex, which includes workspaces, has undergone an interesting transformation, and we are very excited about their interest towards managed workspaces. Enterprises are looking at Table Space to provide integrated, IoT-enabled, agile offices to cater to the post covid office requirement, where the office spaces can be moulded to suit dynamic and changing requirements. The asset light nature of our model makes it the go-to-choice in the post-Covid ‘back to office’ environment. This unmatched agility is our strength and strategy. With many occupiers now considering expansion in smaller cities, what are the challenges & opportunities these cities present?  Table Space is open to entering new markets, including Tier 2 or smaller cities on demand led expansion. Earlier, smaller cities faced a challenge in the supply of A-grade real estate that is NBCI compliant, but even this is getting addressed with bigger commercial real estate developers making their foray into smaller cities. With various models of work coming up, according to you what do the offices of the future look like?  The ’office’, as we know it, has changed forever in terms of design, size and scale, number of employees in the premises etc. However, our assessment is that employees would like to come back to a physical workspace eventually, with the flexibility of work from anywhere perhaps for a couple of days a week. At Table Space we foresee the ‘hub and spoke model’ that we offer becoming even more popular and companies adopting it at a faster pace that before the pandemic. Hence 2022 will be a super high growth time for managed workspaces like ours. Office designs will move towards the IoT enabled, hybrid, agile model where spaces become more fluid and responsive. How are you as a woman leader in commercial real estate mentoring more women to enter this sector? Commercial Real Estate has traditionally been a male dominated industry. As a woman leader in this space, it is my endeavour to encourage women graduates to make a career in real estate. Table Space is an equal opportunity company and we encourage women applicants for roles across functions. In fact, I am happy to share with you that our design team is completely women led and each one of them is being groomed to be a leader. I personally mentor women graduate students of Christ College to encourage them to make a career in commercial real estate and shatter the myth that a career in real estate is a man’s job.