Market Insights: Australia's Flexible Office Space Market Report - Q3 2024
Whether you already have an office or are looking at renting an office for your growing team - this is for you.
Whether you already have an office or are looking at renting an office for your growing team - this is for you. Businesses just like yours are growing, managing costs, and creating fantastic places to work that motivate their staff - and it's all part of the sharing economy and coworking.
This is Our Story not just our business, and it started with us working from home. We then moved to coworking spaces, then shared an office and now we lease our own office and rent it out to other like-minded businesses that we love.
We're like your typical company going through the startup and growth phase. Okay, we're actually a peer-to-peer marketplace for office space - so we should know a thing or two about this, but that's why we built Rubberdesk - to make it easy for others, just like you, to share your office space.
We started out working from home, moved into a coworking space, went on to rent office space from another like-minded business, and then came full circle by taking a three-year lease on an office that's far too big for us today, but gives us room to grow into.
We've rented our own spare desks on Rubberdesk and it covers all our rent and outgoings.
We're now rent-free
All our costs are covered by renting our spare office space out. Yep, all our ongoing costs including rent, land tax, water, electricity, internet, cleaning, and office supplies (yes we even factored toilet rolls into our calculations) are covered by the rent earned through renting our spare office space out on Rubberdesk.
And what's more the businesses who rent office space from us are getting a great deal and are frankly the loveliest bunch of people we could wish for.
Understanding your motivation behind renting out office space will drive many of the decisions you make along the way and result in the best outcome.
The benefits of sharing a space go well beyond purely financial, but it's good to keep an eye on and manage the financials.
Our goal was to be rent-free, in our dream office space, with a meeting room, outdoor space, and room to grow. We achieved that before the first rent was due using Rubberdesk.
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The one thing we consistently hear from Hosts who have had success achieving their ideal outcome is finding the right Guest. With the right Guest:
An office feels better when it's shared with the right people, and there's a good vibe that everyone feeds off. Conversations are easy and productive, and this week in ours included:
Finding the right Guest for our Hosts was at the front of our minds when we built Rubberdesk, so we
Understanding your outgoings is important so you can manage your costs. So, here's a quick checklist to make sure you're counting all your office outgoings. This will help when it comes to understanding the returns and meeting your objectives:
Yep, it gets a section all of its own! Unfortunately, speeds, bandwidth, and costs of internet access in Australia are generally pretty poor.
Guests expect to have good internet access, and this will require a couple of things. Make sure your service has suitable bandwidth for the number of people using it and that the Wi-Fi router can handle the number of people and the size of the office.
It doesn't have to be super fast access to be good - consistent and reliable is good too. For instance, we chose a fixed wireless unconstrained 20MBps up & down connection with a powerful Wi-Fi router that covers the office well and fast. This consistently delivers great speeds up and down and is perfect for 6 different businesses and 11 people sharing the space uploading and downloading the video.
There are lots of service providers out there and it's worth sitting down to consider how many people will be sharing the network and what the impact will be.
Rubberdesk is your one-stop shop to Research and Find your next office.
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This is a question we're often asked and it's sometimes a tricky one to answer.
Firstly, there's quite a wide of sizes of square meters per person out there.
Secondly, you have to be clear on what is being measured - does the sqm/person include just the office space in which they sit, or does it also include the shared areas? Obviously when you include the shared areas the space increases, but you need to consider the space in which you're sat for the majority of the time and whether that's big enough.
Below we consider the overall footprint of the property as the total square meterage, and then divide by the number of desks to get the sqm/person ratio.
Funnily enough, most Coworking operators don't publish stats on the floor space per person, especially when discussing the size of the enclosed offices as this wouldn't then also consider the shared area.
You're focused on your business, and you're not interested in running a "coworking space". That's why we built Rubberdesk: to make it easy for businesses to share office space. You can rent any number of desks or offices and have the same Guests who rent month by month for the long term.
At Rubberdesk, we
And it's free to list
So, maybe you've outgrown your current office space, and are eagerly eyeing up your next office space, but you don't want to outgrow that within the year so you need room to grow.
You might have downsized and had a raft of space around you.
Or like us, you might just want to be around like-minded businesses to share a story with.
The reasons businesses share office space are many and varied, but the point is that spare space is a valuable commodity.
Shared office space is more than just desks and chairs, it's about people and creating great places to be.
It is free to list space on Rubberdesk. We charge 10% of the total contract value over the first 12 months. Check out the Membership Agreement for all the details.
No. Hosts may decline or accept a booking. On Rubberdesk, you're in control.
Rubberdesk is free to use for those who are looking for office space. We are paid a referral fee by the owners of office space for the successful introduction of tenants who become paying customers. Our fees are a standard 10% of the total contract value over the first twelve months.
As specialist brokers in the flexible office market, Rubberdesk is across all the options, offers and availability. We have real time pricing for thousands of spaces listed by hundreds of providers to help find your next office.
It's EASY, FAST and FREE to use Rubberdesk.
We'll give you a call back with a bespoke shortlist of options to discuss.
Or give the experts a call 1300 433 757