How the rise of flexible office impacts traditional brokers – The Amsterdam situation (2018)

This 2018 Coworking Europe presentation by Sven Bertens of JLL examined how the expansion of flexible offices was affecting conventional office brokerage, with particular attention to Amsterdam. It described a local market in which office supply had become scarce across property grades and limited choice had constrained traditional leasing demand. Charts compared Amsterdam office availability in 2015 and 2018, annual take-up from 2008 through the first three quarters of 2018, and district-level take-up in 2017 against earlier years and 2018. The deck then placed Amsterdam within the wider European flexible-workspace market. It reported 29% European growth in 2017, charted openings and total flexible stock from 2010 to an estimated 2018 level, and compared flexible space as a share of occupied stock across five Dutch municipalities. A fictional broker character illustrated how the role could shift toward community management as the sector expanded. The closing slides identified possible areas of work for JLL, including mixed-use regeneration in emerging neighbourhoods, coverage of flexible-space providers and exploration of an online model. The presentation treated flexible workspace as both a competitor for conventional transactions and a source of new advisory opportunities.

Key findings

• The deck reported 29% growth in European flexible workspace during 2017.
• Flexible space represented 5.2% of occupied stock in Amsterdam, compared with 5.5% in Eindhoven, 3.0% in Rotterdam, 2.5% in The Hague and 3.5% in Utrecht.
• The presentation projected that flexible workspaces could grow by up to 30% annually across Europe over the following five years.

Presented by Sven Bertens, JLL, at Coworking Europe 2018