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by deeptote 1278 days ago
I wanted to get out of my office basement and into something that was close by, I went to a WeWork in my locality and while it was a nice space overall, I was astounded by both how expensive, and how empty, it was. For less I was able to find an office space that was closer to my house, owned and operated by a local company, and was larger.
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> For less I was able to find an office space that was closer to my house, owned and operated by a local company, and was larger.

Any tips on that? Currently looking for a place locally and it feels impossible. But this could be due to market size (city of ~200k).

Town of 40k here - we have 3 coworking spaces. I started the first one - just leased a small office building, and started subleasing spaces. Some private office space, some shared public/hotdesk seats. We're small - 12-15 people at a time, max. The others came later, and are larger, but we're all within a 5 minute walk from each other.
They're not called co-working space. They're just regular old small office building. They typically don't have a flashy website, so you have to find them the old way. They may be on CraigsList or even LoopNet
Just Google “executive suites”.

The WeWork business model has been around for decades.

Regus is a chain that has been doing this exact thing. I worked at a startup that used one of those. A lot of the other tenants were lawyers in solo practice.
I live in a city of ~160k and there's a fair amount of them.

They vary from larger 4-5 story office buildings with some shared space, to small single story parks with no shared space - usually with a door and a garage door to the outside.

For a period of time a friend let me use the front of the space he was renting - he was using it as a warehouse for his ecommerce shop. He employed about 3 or so people who would pick & pack orders to be shipped.

Their hot-desk monthly membership is around $300 without discounts. Not cheap but probably cheaper than most dedicated office rents.
Their hot-desk monthly membership is around $300 without discounts. Not cheap but probably cheaper than most dedicated office rents.

Depends. The one thing that WeWord did was locate itself in the better, more desirable, more visible business districts.

If you don't mind having a Sam Spade-style office, you can rent one far cheaper than that. I almost leased one in Seattle's Chinatown for $100/month, but ended up getting a free sub-lease from a friend with extra room at his company in a downtown skyscraper.

Meanwhile in Switzerland, you'll pay around $500 for a hot desk if you want to be at least a bit in the city center/habing a nicer room.

Probably won't get something much cheaper if you'll want something that is nicer than your kitchen table.

I've used pivotdesk for this. It isn't available in all markets but it works well where I am.