Guest post by DeShawn Brown, CEO of Coworks
JLL published a report this April called “The Flexible Office Space Imperative.” It’s written for corporate real estate executives and institutional investors. Dense charts, formal language, lots of footnotes.
I read it on a Tuesday morning and had to put my phone down.
Not because it was surprising. Because it wasn’t. Almost everything JLL describes as the future of flexible work is something independent coworking operators have been doing, figuring out, and refining for years. The research didn’t reveal anything new. It just finally put numbers on what you’ve known from experience.
Here’s what I think every operator should take from it.
The numbers that matter to your business
Get nerdy with me for a moment.
Global office utilization averages 54%. Companies are targeting 79%. That’s a 25-point gap, and in North America it reaches 29 points. Most people read that and think: companies need to fix their real estate. But here’s the other half of the data: 43% of corporate leaders globally expect headcount to grow in the coming years.
More people. Less fixed space. No appetite for long leases.
That tension doesn’t resolve by companies signing more 10-year leases. It resolves by them finding flexible alternatives. And then there’s this:
3% of large enterprises use flex space for more than 10% of their portfolio
42% allocate 1% or less of their headcount to flex solutions
That’s not a saturated market. That’s a market that hasn’t moved yet. The demand coming toward independent coworking spaces is still largely theoretical. Which means operators who get their operations right now are positioned well before the wave, not scrambling to catch it after.
AI made the long-term lease a liability
The JLL report names AI as a powerful new driver of flex demand, and the reasoning is worth sitting with. Companies don’t know which roles will be augmented, which will be replaced, and which new ones they’ll need to create. That makes multi-year space commitments feel more like a trap than a strategy.
Short-duration commitments and pre-built spaces give organizations the optionality to adapt as AI reshapes workforce needs. That is a description of what you offer.
As CEO of Coworks software, I talk to operators constantly about who their members are and why those members chose them over a traditional office. The answers almost always include some version of: they needed flexibility, they didn’t want to be locked in, they wanted to start immediately. AI is pushing that calculation from small startups and freelancers to mid-size companies and enterprise teams. The buyer is changing. The reason isn’t.
This is not a downtown office story
Independent operators in secondary markets, suburban areas, and niche formats sometimes read flex space research and feel like it’s describing someone else’s industry. I want to push back on that directly.
JLL calls out Sun Belt cities and suburban markets specifically as places where adoption is accelerating. They describe the qualities that draw employees to flex spaces as vibrant environments and rich amenities, not size or prestige. And they note that franchise operators are actively expanding into non-gateway markets because demand is following workers, not downtown buildings.
Wellness studios, childcare-integrated spaces, maker spaces, arts coworking: the research validates these formats even when it doesn’t name them. Employees in every market are choosing where to work based on how a space feels and who else is in it. That has always been the independent operator’s advantage over the commodity coworking chains.
Where operations come in
JLL’s recommendations for landlords entering flex space include three things they call essential to delivering a great experience: space booking, community management, and analytics tools. I’d translate that for an independent operator as: the systems that let you run a good space without running yourself into the ground.
At Coworks, we built our platform specifically because operators were spending their best hours on administrative work instead of community building. Billing, access management, room booking, member communications: tasks that technology should handle so that operators can focus on the part that technology can’t replicate.
The JLL research makes clear that the next phase of flex space adoption will reward operators who are ready. Not the biggest spaces. The most organized ones. The ones where a company can show up, get onboarded, book a room, and pay a predictable invoice without anyone having to chase anything manually.
A few honest questions for the road
I’m not going to tell you what to do with this data. But I’d ask you to sit with a few questions about your own operations:
- If a five-person team called today and wanted to start next week, could you onboard them without scrambling?
- Do you know which memberships are active, paused, or past due without opening a spreadsheet?
- Can a new member get access, book a room, and get their first invoice without you touching any of it manually?
- Are you spending more time on administration than on the people in your space?
Most operators I respect are excellent on community and light on systems. That’s not a flaw. It’s how coworking spaces actually get built: by people who cared about the human side first and figured out the rest as they went.
But the research is telling us the market is about to make both requirements. The community you’ve already built. And the infrastructure to serve it at scale.
You’ve done the harder part. The rest is worth thinking about.
DeShawn Brown is the CEO of Coworks, a space management platform built for independent coworking operators. All data in this article is sourced from JLL’s “The Flexible Office Space Imperative,” published April 2026.
