This is co-working: (A look inside the Tishman Speyer's Studio 1 offices.) “As you see around this corner, you have different companies that all have their own private areas,” says Thais Galli, the managing director and head of studio at Tishman Speyer, while showing me around the office. You can rent an office or just a desk for as little as $400 dollars a month. Galli says companies in finance, marketing, startups, and even established firms use the space. The diverse group of companies also share a common area, attend community events, and enjoy highend amenities, but this is not WeWork, the embattled name brand of co-working. This is Rockefeller Center and the company providing the space is Rock Center’s owner Tishman Speyer, a well-established commercial Real Estate Firm boasting $88 billion in assets. The company opened a co-working space called Studio one year ago. They now have nine locations. “This is not just a trend,” says Galli. “It’s not just for startups. It’s a shift in real estate.” “We looked at the market and we see that there are many companies that are growing quickly and we see some big companies that want to move fast,” says Tal Kerret, the president of Silverstein Properties. Kerret says, back in 2013, he listened to his tenants at 7 World Trade Center who said they wanted flexibility. The building owner started Silver Suites, offering month to month leases that give tenants the chance to grow and shrink without the constant overhead. “It’s a shared space with shared amenities; they don’t want to spend all the money for everything on themselves until they grow into a certain size," says Kerret. Both Silverstein Properties and Tishman Speyer say they added the flexible leases and shared space while injecting a lot of hospitality. Tenants we spoke with at both locations say they happily started their company headquarters renting space from WeWork, but say, as their companies grew, they needed a change. "A lot of the downside of the WeWork culture have to do with it [being] quite noisy,” says Eric Kohlmann, the co-founded of Trinnacle Capital Management. “The surroundings and the beer—it seems fun and playful at first, but it’s not always ideal for operating a business." “Jello shots, you know, that’s just not the vibe that we’re looking to project,” says Mary Gay Townsend, the managing partner of Norgay Partners. “This is a level of professionalism that we really appreciate.” And both tenants should have more geographic flexibility moving forward. Tishman Speyer and Silverstein Properties say the new business model works. "We started with these two locations, 7 world trade, 4 world trade. Now, we want to do it in every one of our buildings, maybe two or three floors per building,” says Kerret. “By the next summer, we should be somewhere between 13 [and] 15 locations,” says Galli.
Since entering the co-working sector in next summer , Studio has opened between 13 and 15 locations and plans to take its total to between 13 and 15 by next summer , according to Tishman Speyer , managing director and head of Studio , the real estate company’s co-workspace brand. Silverstein Properties has also entered the co-workspace market, launching the business model in two of its properties in Manhattan ’s Silverstein Properties . Silverstein now plans to open co-workspace centres in all of its office buildings.