Since the beginning of coworking in Mexico, which has been going on for a dozen years, the model of collaborative work spaces has been gaining popularity and expanding in the main cities of the country.

Mexico City, Guadalajara and  Monterrey saw the emergence of the first opportunities for this trend in the country, hand in hand with foreign companies such as Wework, Regus and Spaces, together with groups of Mexican capital such as IOS offices and IZA Business Centers, which managed to consolidate in the country as the leading companies.

At the end of 3Q 2019, prior to the pandemic, Mexico City had a Class A inventory of more than 6.8 million m², dominated mostly by traditional corporate spaces occupied by private companies and government agencies. In that period, coworking spaces represented 4.6% of the entity's total inventory of class A spaces.

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At the end of April 2022, class A inventory already exceeds 7.6 million square meters, of which coworking spaces make up just over 5.4%.

Between 2019 and 2022, many things happened, including the interruption of Wework's IPO and the start of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020, where habits in occupying corporate spaces changed drastically.

At the beginning of the concept, the profile of the occupants was made up of independent professionals, startups, and small companies, and later the ecosystem was fed by larger and more established firms, mainly that found in the model advantages of flexibility, innovation in the use of areas, and multiple built-in facilities.

If we compare the total gross corporate demand of 2020 and 2021, Mexico City maintained similar figures around 333 thousand square meters, while Guadalajara and Monterrey did reflect increases of 183% and 77%, in annual comparisons, to close 2021 with gross absorptions of 52.3 and 87.2 thousand square meters, respectively.

Precisely the period of the pandemic slowed down the exponential growth that coworking had been experiencing prior to the end of 2019, which turned bidders during 2020 to review and validate the reality of potential tenants.

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As a result, we have the case of Wework, which in March 2022, registered the highest traffic of the last two years in Mexico and has observed a continuous increase in the flow of people, having recorded from January to March 2022 an increase of 45% in traffic. its members. In March 2022 alone, the company registered an average flow of more than 7 thousand people per day, breaking the historical maximum reported at the end of February 2022.

That is why this increase in occupancy rates directly affects the gradual recovery that gross demand is showing, where coworking spaces actively participate, standing out in medium and emerging markets.