Coworking Gets Serious As WeWork Land At Brindleyplace

WeWork, the coworking giant, is close to agreeing its first Birmingham hub with a deal to take space at the 96K SF 6 Brindleyplace office building.

The deal is expetced to be the first of three as WeWork creates a cluster in central Birmingham, with deals also close to agreement at Snowhill and Paradise Circus.

The arrangement at Brindleyplace would see WeWork debut in Birmingham by taking the remaining 10 years of Royal Bank of Scotland's lease at 6 Brindleyplace, Estates Gazette reports.

Coworking in Birmingham has so far failed to spark the kind of excitement caused by the fast-expanding sector in both London and Manchester.

However, research by JLL suggested the market could grow by up to 30% a year over the next five years.

So subdued has been the mood in Birmingham that some analysts have suggested the coworking boom would soon fizzle out.

KWB's analysis of the city’s office scene showed that flexible office accommodation accounted for 29% of the total 2018 office take-up.

The total was boosted by Birmingham City University's acquisition of 118K SF at the derelict Belmont Works site in Eastside ahead of its conversion into a £60M STEAMhouse hub for small businesses, the largest deal in the sector. Other new arrivals included Headspace which took 12K SF at Somerset House, Temple Street.

These transactions took the total space acquired for serviced and managed offices in 2018 to 215K SF and followed the 200K SF acquired by serviced and managed office operators in 2017.

"By looking at the average annual take-up of office suites of 5K SF or under over the past five years, we estimate that only 63K SF in the last two years may have been absorbed by serviced offices," KWB Head of Office Agency Malcolm Jones said. "This falls far short of the growth in provision for serviced offices, which may indicate high availability of space in some of these buildings."

The arrival of WeWork has galvanised the market and inspired both rivals and occupiers in London and Manchester, and could now do something similar in Birmingham: at least, that is what cheerleaders for coworking hope.

Avison Young and Savills are letting agents for 3, 5, 6 and 9 Brindleyplace, all owned by HSBC Alternative Investments. Avison Young is advising Royal Bank of Scotland and JLL is advising WeWork.