2021 ACCELERATES DEMAND FOR FLEX OFFICES
Yash Shah's start-up ‘The Address’ is Gujarat’s largest Tier-2 focused co-working, serviced and managed office space. HOW WILL YOU SUMMARIZE THE YEAR 2021? 2021 has been a year of ups and downs if I were to look at the overall real estate scenario. While the residential sector saw a boom as the numbers say, the commercial real estate saw revival which was not expected in 2020. At the same time, people started realizing flexibility being very important to them and hence the concept of coworking/ managed office spaces saw a 3x increase in their business model. It was also a year of laying a foundation for how the spaces will be made and designed henceforth from here with various new models coming into perspective for living and working. WHAT WERE THE CHALLENGES AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES OF 2021? The only challenge that we faced was because of the 2nd wave that kicked in and there was a panic once again about the uncertainty in the market. But with that, our line of business which is co-working and managed office spaces saw a boom and that is what we promoted and marketed for everyone. With that in mind, our revenues kept on generating and it was a good phase for us while everything else was down. That was how we capitalized on the market in a downtime. There have been a couple of new opportunities that we looked forward to, in the other businesses also, such as warehousing, data centres etc. which have done significantly well over the last couple of years LEARNINGS FROM THIS YEAR HAVE BEEN, TO BE EXTREMELY CLIENT CENTRIC AND UNDERSTAND THE MARKET BEFORE PUTTING A STEP FORWARD. IT WAS ALSO ABOUT ORGANIZING THINGS WITH THE NEW WAY OF WORKING AND LIVING AND ABOVE ALL – IT WAS ABOUT SHOWING RESILIENCE WITH THE CHANGING TIMES.