A few weeks ago, I was arranging a meeting with of his time between London, Dubai and Riyadh, this international man of built environment mystery isn’t well suited to a desk-for-hire in one city or another’s stock of flexi office space. Instead, he is one of a growing number of nomadic workers making use of a global network of member’s clubs.
Among the more famous of the member’s clubs in this day-and-age is Soho House. With its first site opened in London’s eclectic West End in 1995, the group now comprises a global footprint. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. Its membership waitlist is one of the eminent boasts of the group, with the who’s who of creative pursuits vying for a seat at the table. Membership growth has been so successful that by early 2024, new memberships were put on hold in cities like London and New York to manage complaints of overcrowding.
“As time passes, more of us are working in companies with fewer staff.”
Contrast the successes of Soho House with factions of the beleaguered office sector with which we are familiar. Talk of a “tsunami” of refinancing due at a time valuations are modest has harkened a tsunami of its own of commentary. In London, pundits have openly called time of death of London’s Square Mile. Anecdotally, I have to agree it still feels very quiet, despite COVID lockdowns distancing further in the rear-view mirror. A more data-led view from CoStar expects city office vacancy to reach 12.1% by the end of 2024.
Adding further complexity to the trend for the conventional office lease market is a longer-term downward trend in employee headcount, while the total count of businesses grows. The UK ONS reports the count of SMEs and sole traders has markedly outperformed the growth of large employers this century. As time passes, more of us are working in companies with fewer staff.1
Technology pundits expect this trend not only to continue, but to accelerate. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is running a tab with his billionaire pals on the moment each expects the emergence of the first sole-employee unicorn
Source: ONS, 2022
(billion-dollar valuation). Is it possible this company is operated from a cosy chesterfield in a London, New York or San Francisco member’s club?
It turns out there are a growing number of people thinking this way. In The Property Chronicle’s spring 2024 issue, Baum and Shegoyan discussed “The real estate investment manager of 2030” and defined two models for operationally intensive assets.
Validating their “sub-contracted” model, I would hazard a guess that most real estate investment managers would struggle to emulate the vibe of Soho House from within. Then again, perhaps they wouldn’t want to. Despite its membership and branding success, Soho House & Co has reportedly never turned a profit in its three-decade lifespan.2 Then we have the WeWork story unfolding
in the public domain over recent years to muddy the waters further.
But the more I speak with thinkers and doers in this space, the more creativity I see applied to defining the Goldilocks space-as-a-service model that manages to compress vacancies and maximise the economics. Watch this space!
1 Graham, L. (2024) ‘Sam Altman’s “one-person unicorn” and the future of the office’, Medium. (Accessed: 2 July 2024).
2 Aspan, M. (2024) ‘Celebrity member club Soho House has lost money for nearly 30 years. Now its CEO is under mounting pressure to turn $22 cocktails into profits’, Fortune. (Accessed: 2 July 2024).
