The latest entrant in the Twin Cities co-working wars? Office Depot.
The office supply retailer is launching Workonomy Hub coworking spaces within its stores. A new co-working location opens today in Office Depot’s Chanhassen location. The Chanhassen location is one of five new Workonomy spaces that Office Depot is opening this week.
The Chanhassen store has 5,500 square feet of space dedicated to its Workonomy Hub.
Like other co-working spaces, Office Depot charges a range of fees based on how often someone wants to use the shared office space. Office Depot charges $40 for a “Daily Drop In,” $100 for a monthly membership, and $675 per month for private offices.
The effort is less than a year old. Boca Raton, Florida-based Office Depot Inc. debuted the first Workonomy Hub outpost in August 2018 in Los Gatos, California. Along with Chanhassen, the chain is opening co-working spaces this week in the Chicago, Houston, Denver, and Orlando, Florida, markets. Chanhassen is one of just eight Workonomy Hub locations now open in the U.S.
In the grand scheme, it’s still a small experiment; Office Depot has about 1,350 stores.
“Technology has dramatically changed the way people conduct business today and Office Depot is uniquely positioned to leverage our internal assets, retail space, and omni-channel platform to help our customers succeed in their professional endeavors,” said Gerry Smith, CEO of Office Depot, in a statement.
Commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield Minneapolis-St. Paul has been tracking the local co-working market. At the end of the second quarter, C&W tallied 1.2 million square feet of coworking space provided by about 40 different operators across the Twin Cities.
Despite the co-working buzz, it’s still a very small corner of the office market. C&W tracks 74.5 million square feet of multi-tenant office space in the metro. Based on those figures, local co-working space accounts for less than 2 percent of all multi-tenant office space in the Twin Cities.
But co-working spaces continue to open left and right. Chanhassen-based fitness chain Life Time is also now in the co-working business. Its first local outpost of Life Time Work opened in St. Louis Park in April.
The Riveter, a Seattle-based co-working concept that focuses on women, just opened in the Twin Cities last week.
New York-based WeWork, the giant of the co-working industry, opens its third Twin Cities location on Monday with approximately 60,000 square feet in the Nordic, a brand new building in the North Loop area of downtown Minneapolis. With the addition of its newest location, WeWork will have approximately 215,000 square feet of space in its three Minneapolis locations.
On the same day that Office Depot announced the expansion of its Workonomy Hub, Houston-based commercial real estate owner and developer Hines unveiled Hines2 – co-working-styled spaces in its buildings. Hines is rolling out the new concept in one building in Houston and another in Salt Lake City.
Hines2 spaces will only be located in buildings owned by Hines and are meant to be an amenity for tenants who already have leases in those buildings. Hines spokesman Mark Clegg said that there are no immediate plans for such a space in the Twin Cities.