BWDisrupt spoke to Vikas Lakhani, Co-Founder, InstaOffice to know more about clients and competitors in this space. Excerpts- InstaOffice, with a network of serviced office and co-working spaces, are building an end to end office space solution, for teams of any size whoneeded an office for any duration. They are trying to bring a systemic change in the way commercial real estate as an economic resource is utilized while allowing their community members to reduce their office occupancy costs and landlord partners to earn superior rental yields.
The fundamental economic model of a serviced office is that the office user pays a single price for the whole service. They like to call ourselves a SSPaS company, Selling Space as a Service, disrupting the traditional way of setting an office. Hence depending on the area, the users will have to pay a single, all inclusive price for per unit of time.
Generally in the commercial real estate space, landlords had been used to the traditional model of leasing where they would lease out their large property to a single client for a number of years and enjoy a regular rental yield. However the demand pattern has considerably moved to smaller teams and for shorter duration, hence the model has become far more dynamic with a very high churn rate. This can be seen in ever increasing vacancy rates inspite of a strong underlying demand for offices.
Problem statement -
In Commercial Real Estate the vacancy periods are usually longer. The dynamics of this industry are changing as people are looking for smaller offices with shorter lock-in periods which allow them to scale up and down whenever required. Leasing out offices in old format is becoming difficult for landlord partners as more SMBs, startups as well as corporate do not find large offices with long-term leases as a viable option.
InstaOffice helps its property partners to turn their properties into serviced offices and open them to newer revenue streams which enable them to generate more revenue than they would have generated in a traditional lease.
While it may be nice to have an office to call your own, there are numerous advantages to using a co-working space, especially for fast-growing and budget-conscious SMBs. One of the greatest appeals of a shared office is that it's work-ready, right when you need it. The typical office-leasing process can take months; once you find a space, you'll need to negotiate a lease, design and construct your layout, purchase furniture, and get your equipment set up before you and your team can begin working in the space. Co-working spaces are havens of productivity, inspiration and happiness. People come to the space because they need to get something done but they stay for the community, collaboration and the networking.
Co-working spaces have successfully emerged as a viable alternative to traditional offices. Typical uses include:
Regional Offices - Sales offices of large companies that may have their primary offices elsewhere
Primary office - For companies with less than 25 - 30 employees, freelancers, startups
Mobility - Mobile professionals like to work from offices in different locations
Remote Hiring - Mature and early stage companies both use co-working spaces to hire employees in locations where they may not have their own primary office (for eg. a Noida based company hiring people in Bangalore or even Gurgaon)
Floating Use - Meeting Rooms, Conferencing Facilities, Hot Desking, Business Lounge
The key to being useful for your community is scale, which allows the members of InstaOffice multiple benefits:
1. Large community to engage with, which adds considerable value to startups and mature companies alike.
2. Different office options, configurations etc that meet their requirements
3. Multiple locations allow our members much needed mobility to today’s times. It opens up number of possibilities for them, including remote hiring, working from the closest location, having multiple small offices to address sales and customer delivery needs, amongst others.
4.Events, ability to connect and exchange business with others in co-working network, access to other offices in the network.
InstaOffice has recently tied up with SEU-IN as well, which is a knowledge corridor between Europe & Indian startup ecosystems. Some of our other Community partners include ClearTax, advisory firms such as InnerWave, Dexter Capital, Vertices Partners (Legal), Oyo, amongst others.
Sometimes for entrepreneurs the tactical benefits outweigh the economical benefits. Especially with startups that are looking for a supportive and conducive ecosystem and networking opportunities, Co-working is more than just a budget office.Their target group is anyone and everyone who needs an office space of their own to work. This typically includes Startups, SMEs, small teams of MNCs. They reach them mostly through our partners networks and organic reach.
They believe the demand for co-working spaces and other form of smaller and flexible offices will far outstrip the supply. Tier 2 cities have already embraced the trend while the industry is still in early stages. Currently, InstaOffice is focusing on a couple of key locations to consolidate their offering and willthen move to further locations.
They are one of the fastest growing brands of serviced offices in the country. Over the next 3 quarters, they plan to build over 100,000 sq ft of offices with over 1500 desks. The primary focus would continue to be NCR and Bangalore during this phase, however, they would also be developing limited presence in other strategic locations..
In 5 years, InstaOffice aims to be the largest operator of serviced offices in the country. They are disrupting the traditional way of setting up an office and they envisage InstaOffice would be the first default go to option for any office seeker, be it for 1 person or 100 people and for 1 hour or multiple years.
With InstaOffice, they have users across the board, ranging from freelancers, professional consultants, early stage and mature startups, SMEs to large corporations and MNCs.
People from Yahoo, Dr. reddy’s, Appier, Staples (WorkStore) Darwin Labs and many more startups & SMBs are using the InstaOffice.
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Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
