The Australian flex market has expanded rapidly over the past decade and is entering arguably its most interesting phase. Colliers’ Flex Equation research finds the national market has grown by 18% in the twelve months to September 2025, with the industry adding an average of 13 new sites a year since 2019.
Hybrid-flex formats – combining coworking, private offices, and enterprise suites now account for half of all flexible workspace in Australia. Closures fell 67% in 2024 compared to the previous year. Flexible Workspace Australia’s Flex Futures 2025 report found 77% of operators grew revenue in the last twelve months and 70% expect further growth in the year ahead.
It’s positive news as the market matures.
But as we look forward to 2030, we should pay attention to the trends and forces which have shaped international markets such as London, Singapore, and New York — each of which offers a preview into what is next and which mistakes not to repeat.
London: the management agreement is now the default, not the alternative
London has led the global shift from master leases to management agreements more decisively than any other market. The WeWork collapse was not the only driver; years of operator defaults left institutional landlords with enough expensive lessons to rethink the structure entirely. The outcome is now visible in the data: 67% of flexible workspace deals in early 2025 were structured as management agreements or revenue-share arrangements (Savills), the highest proportion on record.
Flex now accounts for roughly 10% of London’s total office stock, up from about 6% in 2019 (Spaces to Places 2025). UK managed-office supply grew 111% year-on-year in Q1 2025. The shift is institutional — Landsec (Myo), British Land (Storey), and other listed REITs now operate substantial landlord-branded flex platforms, capturing revenue that in the previous cycle would have been ceded to a third-party operator signing a fixed head lease. Third-party operators have evolved accordingly: many of the savviest, including Industrious (now owned by CBRE), operate predominantly through management agreements and increasingly take operational stakes rather than leasehold ones.
The U.K. lesson for Australia:
The management agreement is not a fringe alternative. In the world’s most sophisticated office market, it has become the default deal structure for new flex supply. Australian institutional landlords – Dexus, GPT, Charter Hall, Lendlease — are on the same trajectory. The question is not whether this structure arrives here, but which operators have the licensed capability, the operating discipline, and the trust-accounting infrastructure to make it actually work.
Singapore: the suburban demand is real, but the policy picture is more mixed than it looks
Singapore is frequently cited as a government-led model for decentralised flex, and there is truth to that framing, but it’s more nuanced than the common narrative suggests.
The underlying demographics favour decentralisation.
84% of Singaporeans live outside the central region, with an average daily commute of 84 minutes. Post-COVID, suburban office demand outperformed CBD demand by roughly 30% (The Instant Group). Approximately 39% of new office development is now planned outside the main CBD. The Urban Redevelopment Authority has established a network of decentralised business nodes – Tampines, Jurong, Paya Lebar, Alexandra, One-North, Punggol Digital District, and the coworking sector has followed with suburban formats proliferating alongside innovation precincts anchored by NUS, NTU, and industry partners.
But the picture in 2026 is more complicated. In January 2026, Singapore’s URA declined to award the master developer site at Jurong Lake District – the largest decentralised office project in the national pipeline, explicitly signalling a preference for CBD office concentration alongside residential decentralisation rather than a wholesale dispersal of work. Decentralised Grade-A rents sit around S$7.87 psf versus S$10.94 psf in the CBD, a meaningful gap but not the collapse of the centre that earlier forecasts predicted.
The SI lesson for Australia:
Suburban flex is a real and undersupplied market – the demographic arithmetic is similar to Singapore’s in Australia’s major metros. But the suburban opportunity is not a substitute for the CBD; it is additive to it. The operators and landlords who will win the suburban wave are those who position suburban hubs as genuine destinations in their own right – with high-quality fit-out, community management, and program overlays, rather than as cheap fallback options. The 2020s Australian outer-suburb and inner-regional opportunity (Parramatta, Richmond, North Sydney, Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast) looks much more like Singapore’s Tampines and Jurong trajectory than like the CBD contraction that some forecasters have been calling.
New York: the enterprise pivot and the flight to quality
New York’s flex market has moved further and faster than any other in the last eighteen months, and the direction of travel is clear: toward enterprise and toward quality.
The single most revealing data point is Industrious’s recent expansion at 12 E. 49th Street (Tower 49), to 291,600 square feet across 18 floors – now one of the largest single flexible office locations in the world, and acquired in part by absorbing the space WeWork exited in bankruptcy. Industrious increased its New York footprint by 58% in 2025 and plans to double signings in 2026. This is the enterprise flex market in its mature form: large corporate occupiers taking flexible space not as a stopgap but as a permanent pillar of real estate strategy.
The broader NYC flex market grew 8.3% quarter-on-quarter in Q3 2025, with 43 new coworking sites added across the five boroughs. Crucially, nearly 48% of New York’s coworking inventory is now in Class A or A+ buildings (up from 44% the prior quarter), a sharp shift from the earlier dominance of Class B stock. Outer-borough flex supply grew 8.04% year-on-year, faster than Manhattan’s growth, as the hub-and-spoke model settled in. CBD attendance remains around 28% below pre-pandemic levels, reinforcing the structural case for satellite flex locations close to where employees actually live.
Enterprise occupiers demand a different product from the typical coworking space: privacy, professional management, custom branding, corporate-grade security, and — critically — the ability to scale both up and down without friction. Flexibility has become a strategic asset, not a cost-containment tactic. Simultaneously, there is a visible flight to experience: the most successful flex sites in New York are not the cheapest but the ones offering the strongest combination of premium design, curated programming, hospitality-grade service, and a community that adds professional value.
The NY lesson for Australia:
The enterprise segment is growing faster than most Australian operators are currently positioned to serve. Colliers’ research confirms hybrid-flex (combining coworking, private offices, and enterprise suites) is already 50% of the Australian market. But the specific capabilities that enterprise occupiers demand – compliance, security, custom branding, dedicated enterprise floors, multi-site access are still scarce. Operators who can deliver enterprise-grade flex, hub-and-spoke networks, and corporate community activation will take a disproportionate share of the growth. Those operating on a single-site, single-product model will be outcompeted by the ones that aren’t.
What the three markets share
Despite their differences, London, Singapore, and New York converge on the same structural shifts:
- Flex is moving from alternative to mainstream. In every market studied, enterprise adoption is the leading edge. Cushman & Wakefield’s 2025 research finds 55% of global occupiers now use flexible office solutions, with 17% planning to increase their use.
- Management agreements and partnerships are replacing master leases. The risk-transfer logic that made head leases attractive to operators in the 2010s reversed when landlords learned the downside was not actually transferrable.
- Quality of community management is the primary competitive differentiator. The best-performing spaces in all three markets — and in the data from OfficeRnD, the Instant Group, and Colliers — are the ones with mature community management functions. (Previous piece in this series.)
- Class A and A+ buildings are capturing a disproportionate share of flex growth. The flight-to-quality narrative in conventional office space applies equally to flex.
- Suburban and near-CBD flex is the fastest-growing geographic segment. In New York, in Singapore, and now in Australia.
- Technology is no longer optional. Booking platforms, access control, member CRM, occupancy analytics, and — emerging rapidly — AI-layered member support are now table stakes.
- Sustainability is a baseline expectation. ESG-compliant buildings with integrated flex offerings are outperforming peers on both rent and lease velocity.
Where Australia actually stands
Australia is behind the global leaders – but not by as much as the received narrative suggests, and in some respects the Australian market is ahead. Independent operators make up 95% of the Australian flex market (FWA 2025), a structural difference from the UK and US where large chains dominate. Customer retention is strong: nearly 70% of Australian operators report annual churn under 10%, a benchmark that most UK and US operators would consider best-in-class. Market value is projected at AUD $537 million in 2025 (IBISWorld), with forecasts ranging from 15% to 23.6% CAGR through 2030 depending on the source.
Where Australia lags:
- Institutional adoption of management agreements is accelerating but still not the default structure on new supply the way it now is in London.
- Suburban flex is emerging rapidly but undersupplied relative to demographic demand, particularly outside Sydney and Melbourne.
- Enterprise-grade flex product — compliance-ready, custom-branded, multi-site — is thinner than the demand signal from Australian corporates warrants.
- Community management as a disciplined hospitality-grade capability (rather than a front-desk role) remains rare, and is the single biggest source of variance between above-average and average operators.
The opportunity in Australia is not to replicate the London or New York playbook identically. It is to read the direction of travel accurately, skip the most expensive mistakes those markets made (over-leveraged operator expansion, head-lease-heavy portfolios, under-investment in community capability), and build the next generation of Australian flex supply with the deal structures, product depth, and operating discipline that those markets took a decade of failures to arrive at.
The twenty-four months from now to early 2028 are probably the most consequential window the Australian sector will have. What gets built, how it’s structured, and who operates it will define the competitive landscape for the rest of the decade. The playbook is already written, the only question is which operators and landlords are reading it.
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Sources and further reading
– Colliers, The Flex Equation (Australian market report), 2025
– Flexible Workspace Australia, Flex Futures Report 2025
– Savills, UK flexible workspace deal data, Q1 2025
– Spaces to Places, UK Flex Office Market 2025
– The Instant Group, Singapore decentralised demand and commute data
– Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority, decentralised business nodes policy
– Hubble, NYC Office Market Q3 2025 Report
– CoStar, Industrious expands at Tower 49, March 2026
– OfficeRnD, EMEA & UKI Flex Space Industry Report 2025
– Cushman & Wakefield, Global Flexible Office Trends 2025
– Rubberdesk, Australian Flexible Office Market Report Q3 2025
– IBISWorld, Australian coworking industry data 2025
– Optix, Australia’s Coworking Market: Pricing, Trends & Growth, 2025
This is part of an ongoing series on the operational and financial dynamics of flexible workspace and commercial real estate. For feasibility work on Australian flex, enterprise flex product, and landlord–operator structures, see [cospaces.com](https://cospaces.com).
