To meet owners’ and occupiers’ growing interest for core and flex office strategy, Avison Young has added eight team members to its flexible office solutions (FOS) team around the country. This includes Joshua Beer and Jillian Brown in Chicago.
“Our team is comprised of experts from all aspects of the flexible office sector, so we bring a really well-rounded perspective to serve the entire flex office community,” said Charlie Morris, head of Avison Young’s FOS group, who joined the company in the fall of last year to build the firm’s service platform and expand it globally.
Beer, a senior consultant based in Chicago, focuses on advisory services across all verticals within the FOS offering, with an emphasis on the occupier vertical. He has years of corporate services experience with Johnson Controls and CBRE prior to entering the flexible office sector at Instant Offices. Most recently, Beer was based in London where he was on the initial team in Europe for the expansion of Hana, CBRE’s owned flexible operation.
Brown, also a senior consultant based in Chicago, specializes in occupier advisory services. After serving in various capacities at Lifetime and CBRE, Brown entered the flexible arena with enterprise sales roles at Serendipity Labs and, most recently, Convene. Brown leverages her experience to support the evolution of occupier’s portfolio management strategies.
“The importance of flex office in an investor or an occupier’s portfolio is nowhere more evident than in the nature of today’s battle for workforce talent and can even be seen in how companies are preparing for business impacts related to the coronavirus outbreak,” said Morris. “We see companies engaging in mobile workplace strategies, some for the first time at scale, by implementing work from home strategies or spreading out their personnel into various shared office facilities to limit exposure to their entire workforce and will need to navigate the dynamics associated with managing a productive remote workforce.”
According to the firm’s Avison Young 2020 Forecast, flexible offerings account for up to five percent of space across most major office markets and is expected to leap to 15-30 percent within ten years. Since January, Avison Young has expanded its multi-disciplinary FOS team in markets including Atlanta, Dallas, New York and Washington D.C.
