The work-from-home movement hasn’t shrunk the amount of coworking space dotting the country or the Midwest, as the latest research from Coworking Cafe shows that the number of flex workspaces in the United States rose slightly to close out 2023.
According to Coworking Cafe’s fourth quarter 2023 National Coworking report, the United States was home to 6,251 flex workspaces at the end of last year. This represented a slight jump of 1.28% from the 6,172 coworking spaces in the country at the end of the third quarter of 2023.
As the report says, that increase isn’t a big one. But it is evidence that the coworking market has stabilized.
At the same time, Coworking Cafe found that the majority of the country’s top-25 markets saw their total coworking inventories increase in the fourth quarter of last year.
In the last three months of 2023, just one-fifth of the country’s 25 biggest markets saw a decrease in flexible workspaces. One of these markets happens to be in the Midwest, Minneapolis-St. Paul, which saw its number of coworking spaces dip by 2% from the third quarter of last year through the fourth. As of the end of the fourth quarter, the Twin Cities market had 85 coworking spaces.
Chicago also saw a slight dip, with its number of coworking spaces falling by 0.4% in the fourth quarter. That was because a single coworking space in this market closed, leaving the Chicago area with 229 coworking spaces.
The national median rate for virtual offices in the fourth quarter stood at $119 a month, which was slightly lower than it was at the end of the third quarter, when it stood at $125. Chicago came in higher than the national median rate, with a median monthly rent of $205 for virtual offices.
The national median rental rate for open workspaces remained the same in the fourth quarter as it was in the previous quarter, standing at $149 a month.
The cost of dedicated desks went down in price from a national median of $329 a month in the third quarter of 2023 to $322 at the end of the fourth quarter. In Chicago, dedicated desks were at the $269 a month mark, below the national median. The second-most affordable rate in this category was in the Dallas-Fort Worth market, where the median monthly rate came in at $271.
The Los Angeles market had the highest number of coworking spaces at the end of 2023 with 268. Dallas-Fort Worth came in third place, with 249 coworking spaces at the end of last year. Chicago pulled up in the fifth spot wih 229 spaces.
Houston ranked sixth with 215 coworking spaces. Other Midwest markets ranking in the top 25 in the number of coworking spaces as of the end of 223were Minneapolis-St. Paul (85 spaces), Austin (75) and Nashville (75).
