What are Niche Coworking Spaces & What’s Their Future?
As coworking spaces gradually take over the traditional work culture, more targeted methods are making their way into the industry. Many coworking spaces are customizing their spaces to target specific types of customers and provide them with most things their professional life may require. These niche coworking spaces are often a lucrative business choice. However, a lot depends on their planning and execution.
If you’re new to the concept or want to know what steps you can take to become a niche coworking space, this article will help you gain a comprehensive understanding.
Niche Coworking: An Introduction
Niche coworking spaces are tailored workplaces for a target coworkers base. Providing said coworking space to serve a specific group of consumers has helped the industry grow out of the traditional coworking mindset of mingled coworking. There are various bases these niches can be decided upon—demographics, gender, profession, lifestyle, and choice.
Niche coworking spaces have allowed every type of working professional to find a workplace according to their needs. For instance, various niche coworking spaces serve only women, preferably working mothers. There are coworking spaces run by and for the empowerment of colored working women and people from the LGBTQIA+ community. These shared workspaces offer people the ability to break out of the traditional working environment and find places that can give them a sense of belonging.
This also makes up for a more focused community where collaboration and networking are more manageable and productive. A niche coworking space that targets only creatives, artists, or techies will allow for better collaboration among community members. A community of entrepreneurs would appreciate a coworking space that allowed them an area to brainstorm and grow without mixing with professionals from different industries.
Moreover, according to an analysis, many businesses and startups are veering towards investing in niche coworking spaces rather than traditional corporate offices. They believe that niche coworking spaces provide better flexibility and a focused environment.
Ways You Can Create a Niche Coworking Space
There are a few ways you can gear up your coworking space to provide niched services and get maximum profit.
Look for a Specific Community To Serve
Before you create unique services and designs for your coworking space, try identifying a need in the market. There’s always going to be a community underserved in terms of coworking spaces. You need to know that even though many traditional coworking spaces have a slew of diverse customer bases, a faction will always be looking for something more suited to their needs or similar people around them.
Banking on this gap can be highly lucrative if you pick a niche likely to respond to a tailored service. For example, you can offer shared working spaces to people from a specific profession, like real estate, law, or marketing.
Do Homework on the Niche Market
Identifying an idea or a niche is just the beginning. Moving forward without researching the need for tailored services among the niched community can be an amateur move. In contrast, doing proper research on the market size of the community and identifying their requirements can help you strategize better.
Sketch a sound strategy for moving forward with your services to your targeted customers. And most importantly, how would you project the fact that you serve a specific community? There are various factors you need to consider for your research, like the location of your space, the needs of the community, and the market size.
Plan What You Can Provide
Now that you know what your target customers require and whether they are receptive to your services, you can move ahead with planning. Planning involves making your space niched to accommodate the needs of the community. You may need to think about the comfort of the community. If your niche is working mothers, offering daycare services along with the coworking space can serve you well.
Moreover, look out for what your competitors are doing and how you can come up with a differentiating factor. If your services and their values are an advantage over your competitors, you would be better poised for a stream of customers.
Future of Niche Coworking Concept
Niche coworking spaces are favorable for both the space owner and the coworkers, in terms of profit and comfort. Since a niched community is more likely to prefer similar things, everything is more efficient, from providing services to decision-making on event choice. Given this concept’s lucrative prospect for the industry, every coworking space owner is poised to serve a niche.
With the pandemic over and the global economy back to prioritizing tourists and digital nomads, it’s all the more beneficial for coworking spaces to shift to serving a more niched customer base. People from all walks of life will seek out your coworking space. Managing the operations in a heterogeneous mix can be troublesome compared to serving a community with similar requirements. That is why the future of this industry is tipping more toward the niche concept.
Conclusion
A niche coworking space targets a particular type of customer. There are spaces for most niches like women-only, incubators for startups, spaces for senior citizens, etc. The concept is more likely to be ubiquitous in the future. Traditional coworking spaces may need to upgrade to keep up with the trend.
