Making Your Office Space Work
gents share what they most need from their firm’s office space.
By Deirdre LePera, Director of Business Development
Many real estate brokerages have faced a reconfiguration of their office space in the last 10 years, whether it was to keep the doors open during the recession or keep up with attracting talent during the housing recovery.
A challenge many broker-owners currently face is how to combat underused office space. As one of the highest expenses a broker-owner can incur, office space can start to feel unnecessary in a hurry, especially when your sales associates are in the office less than 20 hours a week.
Working Remotely
The capability of working remotely is driving a shift in office space design and prompting a growing trend towards mixed-use spaces and more casual design concepts. Open office concepts are popular right now, regardless of the industry. However, roughly 44 percent of today’s real estate brokerages retain a 50/50 mix of private and open work-space, making semi-private office design the most popular.
Redefining Workspace
In REAL Trends’ recent partnership study, Redefining the Relevancy of Workspace, with BoomTown, dotloop and
ERA Real Estate, sales associates shared what they need most from their firm’s office space, and broker-owners provided valuable insight on what design concepts work best for them based on demographic, market and overall company size.
With an estimated two million active real estate licensees in the United States, the expectation of a broker-owner to provide some meeting or workspace is unlikely to change anytime soon. What will transform is the expectation of what that space looks like. If an office redesign is in your near future, take a few moments to read the study, and learn what it takes to create a successful work environment in your brokerage.
