Flyspaces bills itself as “Airbnb for office and retail spaces.” The idea is to build a network of offices, meeting rooms, and commercial spaces that businesses and entrepreneurs can lease for short periods or whenever they need them.
This concept isn’t new, of course. In the US, several startups like Liquidspace and Storefront are dealing with work and retail spaces. There’s also Breather, which lets users stay in quiet rooms where they can work in peace or just breath and chill out, as the name implies.
But Flyspaces claims to be the first to bring this concept to Southeast Asia. “The idea is already a working model internationally. I just localized it to Southeast Asian markets. I decided to do it ‘cause I myself went through the pain of finding office spaces in Manila, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, etc, and I’ve noticed the total lack of flexibility,” says founder and CEO Mario Berta.
Mario, who comes from a sales background, served as regional CEO for Rocket Internet-backed Easy Taxi for 2.5 years and Nova Founders director for six months. He has been based in Asia for six years now, four of them in the Philippines.
Cherry-picking tenants
Flyspaces’ entry is timely as the region’s fast growth has heated up the real estate market.
Citing a report by property consultancy firm Jones Lang Lasalle, Mario says some cities such as Manila and Jakarta have the lowest office vacancy rates in the world – below four percent.
The huge demand for office spaces has made the market very “pro-landlord.”
“Landlords can cherry-pick among possible tenants,” he says. “When I was working for Rocket Internet, I had to submit a company profile to every landlord in Manila and I kept being rejected just because the word ‘startup’ was in it. As landlords were afraid of defaulting tenants, they wanted a safe bet. I started labeling it an IT company and finally got a space.”
As a precaution, commercial landlords would normally ask tenants to shell out six months’ worth of rent as deposit and pay another six months in advance. That lack of flexibility is a challenge for small enterprises and individual entrepreneurs who can’t afford to engage in costly long-term contracts.
“We want to offer a complete and comprehensive selection of spaces to clients who need them on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis. These clients could be freelancers looking for a better internet connection than a coffee shop, or a company that needs meeting rooms for a couple of hours around town, or a satellite office or brand that is looking to set up a pop-up shop to test a product,” Mario explains.
For realtors, Flyspaces also offers an attractive proposition: make money out of unutilized space that you need to maintain anyway.
Expanding footprint
Since its launch early this month, the company has signed up multinational office space company Regus on its site, as well as several startups providing co-working space in the Philippines, including Aspace, Acceler8, Bitspace, and Penbrothers.
Apart from the Philippines’ capital Manila, Flyspaces is doing business in Cebu, the country’s second largest city. It will start expanding internationally to all Southeast Asian cities in December, says Mario.
“We’ve had more than 500 sign-ups in the first seven days,” he said. “Most of these people do not have immediate need for space, but we’ve made a couple of hundreds of dollars in bookings so far.”
Meeting rooms on the site can be rented for US$10 per hour to US$500 per hour, while offices are leased for US$100 per month per person to US$500 per month per person. Payments can be made via credit card, bank deposit, wire transfer, and soon Paypal. Just like Airbnb, Flyspaces takes a commission of 20 percent of each successful booking.
Signing up should be a no-brainer for landlords who want to maximize their assets. The challenge for Flyspaces is how to educate the end-users about its service and have them use the platform instead of a normal phone call to landlords to inquire about rooms, says Mario.