Industrious Buys Coworking Space Operator With Large Singapore Presence
SINGAPORE – The Great Room, a coworking space provider with five outlets in Singapore, has been purchased by Industrious, a New York-based flexible office space provider backed by CBRE, reported The Edge on Tuesday evening (10 May, SGT).
Industrious also acquired European coworking space operator Welkin & Meraki.
Based on a source quoted by Bloomberg, Industrious forked out roughly US$100 million (S$139 million) in cash and stock to pick up the two firms. The deal adds more than 350,000 sq ft of flexible workspace to its portfolio across six new markets in Europe and Asia, on top of a 600,000 sq ft pipeline of new transactions across important cities in the two regions.
Notably, The Great Room’s portfolio comprises about 180,000 sq ft of coworking space across seven locations. These include five in Singapore at Raffles Arcade, Ngee Ann City, Centennial Tower, Afro-Asia Building, and One George Street. Its two remaining branches are found in Bangkok and Hong Kong.
As for Welkin & Meraki, it runs five coworking centres across Paris, Brussels, and Eindhoven.
Both purchased entities will continue to operate under their respective brand names, but their members can access workspaces in both ecosystems.
“We are thrilled to bring on The Great Room and Welkin & Meraki within the Industrious ecosystem, especially given our aligned intent to provide high-quality, flexible workplaces,” commented Industrious’ Co-founder and Chief Executive Jamie Hodari.
“We look forward to expanding our offering on a global scale to better support work-from-anywhere models, while keeping our commitment to the highest customer satisfaction in the industry.”
Meanwhile, The Great Room’s Co-founder and CEO Jaelle Ang will continue to retain her Chief Executive position.
She also forecasted that the coworking space market will grow in the next 10 years to account for about 30 percent of overall commercial space across the world from its present level of 3 percent.
As for The Great Room, Ang shares revealed that the company is currently negotiating deals to further expand in its current markets, while there are also plans to venture into new markets nearby, including Sydney, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
