50% demand for our co-working spaces now from large MNCs: Awfis CEO Amit Ramani

The demand from large MNCs for co-working spaces has shot up to 50% of Delhi-headquartered Awfis Space Solutions' total pie over the past 12 months amid increased flexibility demand from employees even as firms are unsure of the best hybrid work format, according to its Founder & CEO Amit Ramani.

"Pre-pandemic, 80% of our business used to come from SMEs and mid-sized corporate and startups who adopted flexible work to save costs and for better infrastructure. In the past 12 months, large occupiers have taken this on in a big way. Today, 50% of our demand comes from large occupiers which include companies from the top 100 MNCs in India and globally," said Ramani at a virtual event on flexible workplaces organized by CII Maharashtra and ANAROCK Property Consultants on Friday.

He said the company sold in two months the number of seats it used to sell in a year. It's a 6x jump, he added. The demand is also being driven from tier 2 cities as forward-thinking firms have realized many people in the workforce have migrated to smaller towns and chunk of the population may not return, he said.

"The demand is absolutely out of control. If I was in the developer community, I would be rushing to Indore, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Kochi and Coimbatore to set up shop. I have a demand of 5,000 seats from a single operator in a city like Jaipur, whereas there are only four compliant office buildings in that city. The opportunity and supply-demand mismatch has never been this dramatic in any metro city. Tier 2 cities are going to be the next big story for all of us," he said.

The CII-ANAROCK report 'Workplaces of the Future unveiled at the event found that the revenue from the co-working spaces market will potentially double over the next five years at a CAGR of 15% as it is the preferred way to adopt the hybrid work model compared to options like changing existing office layouts or the hub-and-spoke model. Currently, there are 35 million square feet of flexible office space across the country. Of this, 71% or 25 million sq ft is by the large operators. Around 3.7 lakh flexible seats are currently spread across the major tier 1 and tier 2 cities of India.

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