This is the time of year we normally release our annual coworking forecast. And this year would have been our 10th annual forecast (click here for our 2018 forecast). But after a great deal of deliberation, we've decided not to do one this year.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re still going to be researching coworking. We’re just no longer going to do an annual space and membership forecast.
There are several reasons for this:
First and foremost, we're no longer sure how to define coworking in a way that allows us to do a meaningful forecast. As we pointed out last week, there's a lot confusion around what is and is not "coworking".
We still like the definition we've used since 2010. But the industry has continued to expand, evolve and mutate in a wide variety of ways. This is leading to new definitions of coworking, or at least the expansion of the definition to include a wide variety of spaces.
As Laurent Dhollande, Cloud VO CEO and long time flexible workspace expert, explained on the workspace-as-a-service LinkedIn group:
"... the terminology of “coworking" is now strongly identified with flexible and on-demand office spaces of all kind by landlords, brokers, large Enterprises, and the public at large ..."
He's right. And this means we no longer have a clear definition of coworking. And without a clear definition, it's hard to do a forecast.
Secondly, however you define it, the global coworking industry is big and growing fast. It's always been very challenging tracking and forecasting the coworking industry.
It's been the forecasting equivalent of chasing a runaway train. And that train has gotten very big and is moving rapidly.
For example, JLL is forecasting that there will be 13 million people working in coworking spaces in India alone in 2020. This is more members than we were projecting the entire world would have in 2020 just a couple of years ago.
Coworking is also booming in China, Japan and many other places - including New York, where CBRE data shows (click to enlarge the chart below) the demand for flexible space has dramatically increased in 2018.
The global coworking industry has reached a scale where we're no longer confident in our ability to collect and analyze the massive amount of global city-by-city and country-by-country data required to do an accurate forecast.
And last but not least, coworking is no longer emergent, it has emerged. As you can tell by our name, Emergent Research, our focus and expertise is on identifying, researching and forecasting emerging shifts and trends.
Because coworking is now a large, established global industry, it has attracted the attention of traditional industry analyst firms (CBRE, JLL, Yardi Matrix, etc.) that are better positioned to provide ongoing multinational coworking forecasts.
As we said at the top of this article, we will continue our research on coworking.
We've always considered coworking a window into the future of work. It's a great laboratory for studying a wide range of emerging social, demographic, economic and technological trends.
And we’ll keep providing updates on our research here and elsewhere.
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