Scentre, the owner and manager of Westfield malls, is stepping up its involvement with co-working hub operator WOTSO, with a new site to open at its Woden shopping centre in Canberra. The Westfield Woden facility follows the establishment of a WOTSO venue at Westfield Chermside in Queensland, the country’s first such co-working facility in a shopping centre. For both Scentre and WOTSO, the consolidation of their arrangement at Woden – and there could be more hubs to come – represents a significant and carefully considered extension of their business models. “We’re really about driving the ecosystem of visitation, whether that is people coming for retail or entertainment or for medical or now increasingly working, particularly in co-working,” Scentre’s chief operating officer, Greg Miles, told The Australian Financial Review. [dm-listing-recommendation experimentname=’midcontent-listings’ positiononpage=’midcontent’] “We’re accommodating a trend and a change in the way that people work.” The Woden move come as the co-working model matures to become a mainstream option, while retail landlords look for ways to diversify their malls and attract more visitors as they negotiate changing patterns of consumption and challenging conditions in the retail sector. The hubs-in-malls theme is succeeding. At Chermside, WOTSO has reconfigured its layout three times to accommodate increasing demand. The venue has a waitlist for office space. Logical next step Its users are also diversifying beyond the gig economy style workers and start-ups typically associated with hubs. Larger and well-established brands are also taking out memberships. Mr Miles is quick to point out that for Scentre, which has always held a component of office space in its centres, the hubs venture is a logical next step both in tenancy and in generating foot traffic through the mall. “Much as we are curating the retail mix, we’re now much more focused on curating the commercial mix and how that commercial mix drives or interacts with all the activities which are going on in the ‘living centre’,” he said, referring to Scentre’s vision for its malls. WOTSO, an arm of listed property fund manager BlackWall, typically looks to reuse high-profile locations in space not traditionally associated with office use. It has a Bondi Junction hub in a former Chinese restaurant, while its North Strathfield facility occupies the biscuit factory where Arnott’s once made Tim Tams. Setting up shop in Westfield malls extends that strategy of taking hubs to where they’re needed, according to BlackWall chief executive Stuart Brown. “WOTSO at shopping centres follows our ethos of putting workspace where people live.” he said. [dm-listing-recommendation experimentname=’below-content-listings’ positiononpage=’belowContent’]
Owner and manager of Westfield malls, Scentre, and co-workspace operator, WOTSO, are opening a co-working centre in the Woden shopping centre in Canberra. The Canberra site is the second co-working venue the two companies have launched as they seek to accommodate the trend for co-working, the change in the way people work, and the changing patterns of consumption. The companies’ co-working venue at Westfield Chermside in Queensland, which was the country’s first co-working facility in a shopping centre, has been reconfigured three times, in response to increasing demand, and has a waiting list for membership.