The empty office problem by the pandemic

San Francisco has faced the empty office problem by the Pandemic. So currently, a preferred solution is converting an office building into a residential building because it's cheaper than building a new one. By the way, there are a bunch of regularities that the developers want to tackle before they take on a conversion project.

New York has the same issue. Especially the old office towers have struggled with the number of vacancies.

I have lived in a brand-new apartment that provides a bunch of office facilities such as a conference room, a shared printer, and an open space. The first impression was great. Also, it made me think about a new trend. However, I still prefer to work in my home because the office space in my apartment does not provide a private office for me where I can install my office environment such as an external monitor, etc. So I think the office building conversion project should consider more factors to increase the success rate of the conversion.

What if a new residential building provides a shared office space such as the WeWork? After Covid-19, the WeWork business has shrunken because the number of people doing the WFH has increased dramatically. Additionally, the recession is causing small and medium sizes companies to reduce the cost of expenses for their offices. So I think that the WFH trend will not be gone.

So the question is whether there is a solution in the middle. Something is between the residential building and the shared-office building such as WeWork. So let's list up a few requirements that the solution must have.

• The solution office should be near an employee's residence because no one wants to commute to the office. It should be like building a Starbucks store. Searching a spot that covers a company's employees' residential areas as much as it can.
• The solution office could be distributed to a medium or a large apartment community. It could be a cost-effective strategy to expand the solution business.
• The solution office should meet the client companies' requirements such as managing working hours for their employees.

Recently, Mark Neumann who was the founder of WeWork started a new startup "Flow". So I am interested in watching what he will do for solving the empty office problem these days.