Los Angeles Squeaks Into Top 10 Markets for Co-working

Josh Wrobel is a managing director at JLL.

Los Angeles barely made the top 10 list for co-working activity. According to a new report from JLL, the city came in tenth in the nation for co-working, with New York and San Francisco taking the first and second positions. Silicon Valley came in third on the list, with Austin, Boston, Northern Virginia, Washington DC, Seattle and Denver rounding out the list. It was surprising that Los Angeles didn’t land a higher ranking, considering the substantial co-working presence in the market, but Josh Wrobel of JLL says that, in this case, the numbers aren’t aligning with the reality of the market.

“If you take a more segmented look at the statistics, you could argue that Los Angeles’ content corridor—Burbank/Hollywood down to Culver City/Playa Vista—is the most saturated flexible office space market in the nation. Flexible office space fits perfectly with Los Angeles’ content corridor tenant base because it has the perfect blend of technology start-ups, Silicon Beach, and budding new companies in general as well as the traditional short term nature of contracts in the media and entertainment industry—production companies backed by great credit industry titans, but with short term contracts tied to the specific productions of TV shows, movies and gaming,” Wrobel, managing director at JLL, tells GlobeSt.com. “As such, if you segment out the West Los Angeles market, including Hollywood, flexible office space’s saturation has exceeded 5% of the market, which would put it ahead of every other market in the country from a percentage of occupancy perspective.”