When people aren’t in a centralised office, will they work at home or will they want to “work near home” by heading to a nearby office?

If workers do want to work in offices closer to where they live — and companies are willing to pay for it — then the hub-and-spoke work model could play a significant part in the future, and suburban offices could become more valuable.

If your central office tenant has cut their space, maybe you should hedge your bets and buy suburban assets to capture this new source of demand? Some in the market are big believers in this future.

“We’ve got the data that shows people don’t want to commute, but they do want to go into an office,” IWG Chief Executive Mark Dixon said. The world’s largest flexible office company said it saw demand grow fastest in its suburban locations in 2021. It has struck deals with companies like NTT and Standard Chartered that allow hundreds of thousands of staff to work in any of its global locations.

But not everyone is sold.

“I don’t want to have to drive into an office somewhere nearby to me just to work with two or three people from the same company that I don’t actually work that closely with,” Patrizia Head of Transactions for the UK and Ireland Phil Irons said.

Our adventure is focused on the fate of your central office building, so we’ll leave this line of enquiry for you to ponder. Good luck.

To return to that building's journey into the future of work, click here.

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