What are the problems in the joint office industry?

Unbalanced cost income and expenditure.

The problem of cost composition has always restricted this industry. Joint office costs are divided into fixed costs and flexible costs. Fixed cost is defined as the lowest cost input for normal operation of space, mainly including property cost and basic operating cost, accounting for almost 100% of the total cost. Variable cost refers to the increased cost of each additional customer, which can be ignored. Because of this cost structure, if the space cannot attract investment quickly, and if the daily cost is covered by income, it is easy to make ends meet for a long time. At present, many spaces in the world are still occupied by the continuous expansion of investors under the condition of low occupancy rate.

Take a famous joint office brand as an example. Brand project is located in the core area of Beijing CBD, with a volume of 20,000m2 and 3,300 stations. Let's calculate the cost, income and expenditure of this project.

Property fee = rental cost+property management fee = 4.2 million/month? (According to the internal investigation, the rent is 6 yuan/㎡/day, which is much lower than the previous market price; Property fee 30 yuan/㎡/month)

Basic operating cost = manpower+network+promotion+water and electricity+taxes and fees+daily maintenance, etc. There is no basic operating cost, so we think the limit is 0.

If the income is calculated according to the income of 2,500 yuan/month per station (office station income of the project), then the calculated income will be the largest income, so to cover the confirmed property cost of 4.2 million, at least 1680 stations need to be rented, but the number of rented stations is less than 800 in the past six months. If you want to cover the basic operating costs, the number of rented stations will increase a lot.

Recently, the brand rented and sold its workstation to a big customer, taking the form of rent one get one free. The price reduction is amazing, but in order to cover the high fixed cost, this way is a last resort.

low income

The joint office industry is not a profitable industry as everyone thinks. Now the income is mainly concentrated on rent, and the rent premium is not as high as you think. According to the general income of a workstation 1.500 yuan (excluding the passage fee), if the per capita workstation occupies a building area of 6m2, the daily income is 1.500 yuan/month ÷ 6m2 ÷ 30 days =8.3 yuan/day, and the basic operating cost accounts for 1/4 of the income, and the final income is 6.2 yuan/. But this 1.2 yuan/day is the ideal profit under the condition of full rent, and it is difficult to get the income of 1.2 yuan/day.

On the other hand, joint office enterprises all hope to realize their income through value-added services, but although we-work has made continuous efforts in value-added services, its revenue has only increased by single digits, and rental income accounts for more than 90% of the total revenue. We still have reservations about making money on value-added services in the future.

It is difficult to attract investment.

At the beginning of the brand, there were only 1-2 spaces, and the founding team often relied on their own contacts to achieve a high space rental rate. However, with the expansion, the network resources of the founding team dried up, and tapping market customers became the focus. The public creates space to cooperate with intermediary channels and service providers, develops crowdsourcing systems, and encourages the recommendation of old customers to tap market customers. However, in the actual investment promotion, we found that none of many means can bring customers continuously and stably.

On the other hand, customers with office needs are still accustomed to working in traditional office buildings or commercial and residential buildings, and working in joint office space requires a long educational process. Many people don't even know what joint office is.

At the same time, for some teams, this model has not really saved costs. Finally, the relatively high cost has also caused some entrepreneurial teams to give up this office model.

? Asking about the difficulty of community operation

Almost everyone who works in a joint office wants to be a community, hoping that users can communicate in the space, create value and form a sense of belonging to the space, but the result is often that internal customers don't communicate. One of the reasons for non-communication is that there is a competitive relationship between customers, such as the joint office space of a cultural and creative park, where customers are highly homogeneous and there is business competition, and communication and sharing may be stolen by creativity. The second is that the customer attributes are too different, such as the Internet startup team and the traditional real estate marketing team. The two teams are very different in age, thinking and lifestyle, so it is difficult to form the same topic and even "despise" each other to a great extent.

Providing self-service is not helpful to entrepreneurs.

At present, all joint offices basically do not have the service ability, and the services they can do are based on external resources to serve the internal entrepreneurial team.

Docking investment and financing: The most typical way is to throw the entrepreneur BP to the outside investment institutions, or invite some investment institutions to engage in roadshows. Only entrepreneurs themselves know whether entrepreneurs can get capital.

Mentoring service: the space cooperation mentor is basically just a photo on the wall. Occasionally participating in space activities will not give systematic guidance to entrepreneurs. Of course, this is of very limited help to entrepreneurs. In fact, many tutors are willing to be space tutors or their main purpose is to expose themselves.

Training service: All kinds of free resource grafting activities are still an exposure activity of the event organizer's brand promotion, with low quality and unsystematic. This kind of training activity is of little help to entrepreneurs and takes up time.

Other services: registration, finance, legal affairs and other services are also completed by external service providers. Every space is the same service provider, such as a legal company. I can see it on the logo wall in many spaces. Space and service providers have reached a mutual understanding, one is to promote their own brands, and the other is to return for each other. But although it is helpful to entrepreneurs, it is limited.

Generally speaking, the five major problems have appeared more or less in all major spaces, which is a common problem in the whole industry. In the future, we also hope to guide you to further think about these five problems and try to find solutions with you. In the next issue, we will focus on the imbalance of joint office costs and try to find a solution.