Good post. I left a comment. Here are some other things:
1. We're just about to have one of the biggest Commericial Real Estate crashes, ever. CRE always lags residential, and it's just getting started. I've watched my whole working life as companies reduce the dignity of their professional employees through first reducing office size, then eliminating private office in favor of cubes, then finally driving employees right out of the building. This may change, and I suspect it almost *has* to change in the future. For one, CRE rents are probably going to fall, possibly by a lot. If that happens, the pendulum will swing back to keeping people in the office. Back in the midwest, where parking is cheap, not only is one expected to appear at work, one is expected to be *punctual*: "Our workday starts at 7:30am." Management driven to cut infrastructure costs drove workers out of the office. Management without that constraint is going to want people IN the office, where they can keep an eye on them. 2. The high cost of CRE makes it very difficult to bootstrap a business. If VC funding would dry up for a few years, CRE rents would fall back to a sustainable level. That is, rents would be inline with what a business's customer base could support. And a business with a lot of customers is going to be too busy serving those customers to worry about sharing the costs of a community workspace. But there is still a lot of opportunity in the coworking space. I believe every neighborhood in SF with a business district could support at least one space (except Marina/Cow Hollow *cough*), and many could support several (Mission, Castro, Potrero Hill, SOMA, etc). In my opinion, the biggest potential market (or customer base) for coworking is hardly discussed: Early retirement aged Boomers (IANAB). Talented, hard-working, with a lot of skills, and utterly unemployable people. I'll close with that. -d On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Venkat <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have been reading this group and following the conversations for a > couple of months, though I haven't yet found a way to take the plunge. > Hope you guys find my latest blog post on coworking entertaining; it > combines a review of "I'm out of here" with some general thoughts on > the movement: > > http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/04/15/coworking-im-outta-here-by-jones-sundsted-and-bacigalupo/ > > Regards, > > Venkat > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
