growing and flexing
Houston sees growth in coworking space, rises in national ranks for 2023
Houston continues to grow its coworking space across the city — and the progress is notable just between the first and second quarters of 2023, a recent report shows.
When it comes to coworking space growth, Houston saw an increase of 16 percent between June and March of 2023, reports CoworkingCafe. This stat means Houston outpaced the national average, which is 10 percent. Houston, which now has a reported 208 coworking and flex office space facilities, edged out Boston in the overall rankings of cities based on number of coworking spaces.
Houston ranks No. 7 now behind Manhattan, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas - Fort Worth, and Atlanta, respectively.
When it came to the amount of space coworkers in Houston have, the Bayou City reported "an equally impressive expansion in terms of square footage," reads the report, "the market logged the highest increase in this metric and ended at more than 4,160,000 square feet of coworking space."
Nationally, coworking space totals 120 million square feet, which is a 6 percent increase between Q1 and Q2 and about 1.74 percent of the total office space nationwide.
While Houston saw growth in its coworking space, half of the top 25 markets for coworking have seen decreases in 2023 so far. Philadelphia, Seattle, the Bay Area, and Denver saw a decreased square footage average, but this trend isn't reflected when it comes to the number of coworking spots, which "likely equates to an increased focus on smaller coworking spaces across the nation," the report finds.
"With falling property values in some cities and rising interest rates, the commercial real estate industry is at a crossroads," says Doug Ressler, business intelligence manager at Yardi Matrix, in the report. "Many companies still aren't certain the number of employees who will be in their physical office space in the near or long term. That has led to firms doing smaller projects with startups, like pilot tests, instead of larger-scale purchases."
In January, Texas coworking company Common Desk announced its sixth Houston-area location. Common Desk also shared that it's expanding in the Ion last December, and that construction is ongoing.
The Cannon, a Houston-based coworking company, its latest locations in Fish Creek and The Woodlands, which is a partnership with Amegy Bank.
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