Co-working firm forays into Tamil Nadu

In a month’s time, the organisation plans to launch its second centre at RMZ Millenia Business Park, OMR making it among the city’s largest co-working spaces spread across 88,000 sq. ft with a seating capacity of 1,500 members. 

Sidharth Menda, Founder and CEO, CoWrks, said, “Chennai is a large and important market for us, owing to its diverse mix of people from various business, in different stages of evolution. It is emerging as a hub for diverse sectors and industries including technology, innovation, automobile and many more. We have also seen demand from enterprises, Fortune 500 companies, who already operate out of Chennai. They now look at co-working spaces as part of their core real estate strategies. When it comes to them, there is a sort of 60-40 divide between tradition office spaces and co-working spaces.” 

Commercial office spaces comprise about 40 mn sq ft of real estate space in India. Co-working currently accounts for less than 10 per cent of that. Over the next four years, this number could rise to about 35-40 per cent Pan India. And companies like CoWrks are facing an opportunity to add 16 mn sq ft of co-working space over this period. 

He adds, “We already have two operational spaces in Bengaluru, and nine spaces in the pipeline. In Bengaluru, the two locations can house 700 and 3,000 members respectively. In Chennai, the Porur workspace has a capacity of 900 desks, and the second workspace in OMR, can house 1,350 desks. It’s slated to come up on Jan 31, 2018. Currently, the Porur property has been pegged to have an occupancy of 70 per cent  and the company has set a target of 100 per cent over the next two months.”