Timeshare Comes to the Office: Companies Save Money on Space by Alternating Days

Thousands of companies across the U.S. are still grappling with exactly how much office space they need when many employees are in the workplace only part of the week. A growing number of companies now let their employees work part time from home but still want them to be together in the office at least a few days a week to foster collaboration. That means offices are either mostly full or mostly empty, depending on the day of the week.

Enter Codi. The flex-office-space company manages about 50 furnished, private offices and coordinates office sharing so that the same set of desks, huddle rooms, whiteboards and snacks can be used by two to three different companies that occupy that same space on different days of the week.

These arrangements, which are something like a timeshare rental for offices, mean companies pay only for those days when their offices are likely occupied. About 35% of Codi’s customers lease an office for fewer than five days a week, said Chief Executive

Christelle Rohaut.

The office timeshare concept doesn’t work for everyone. It is geared toward smaller companies and startups that do most of their work on laptops and don’t store sensitive information in bulky servers or filing cabinets.

“We have everything in the cloud anyway,” said

Piero Molino,

CEO of machine-learning-platform startup Predibase, which pays roughly $6,000 a month to use a Codi office in downtown San Francisco every Tuesday and Wednesday. The company has 25 employees, with about half based in the Bay Area and around eight who come in on a typical Tuesday, he said.

At Frontier, a job-recruitment company, founder

Elliot O’Connor

was working remotely during the pandemic in a variety of apartments when he realized he missed not having an office.

“I’ve just been spending crazy amounts of time in my bedroom for the last two years,” he said. “I just felt like I needed a change.” Getting a membership at a co-working space was an option, but Mr. O’Connor preferred a private office that would be his alone when he was in the building.

But because Mr. O’Connor is the only one of Frontier’s 20 employees based in the Bay Area, he had little interest in coming to the office five days a week, or for spending money on more days than he needed.

“If we’re not going to need it, then we may as well not pay for it,” he said.

So he settled on the San Francisco office, a roughly 900-square-foot ground-floor space with a big table and a kitchen. Frontier pays about $1,500 a month for the space on a three-month lease.

Mr. O’Connor said he doesn’t even know who occupies his space on Tuesday and Friday. He suspects that one tenant is a food-delivery startup, based on scribbles left behind on the office’s whiteboard. He said the space’s three users do a good job of keeping it clean and throwing away trash at the end of the day, and the only items left behind by the other tenants are monitors.

“We’re all adults,” he said.

For some companies, cutting back on days means they can afford more space. Fuzzy, a pet-telehealth company based in San Francisco, initially sought a 2,000-square-foot office, said the company’s general counsel,

Dave Toomey.

It is now leasing about 3,000 square feet—but only for Tuesdays and Wednesdays. At roughly $8,000 a month, the price tag is about half of what a similar office would cost under a traditional lease, Mr. Toomey said.

Like Mr. O’Connor, Predibase’s Mr. Molino said he has no clue who the office’s other tenants are. The office has a fridge, and food left behind by yesterday’s occupier is fair game in keeping with the arrangement’s sharing spirit, he said. “We’re not going to fight over a granola bar,” he said.

Mr. Molino sometimes keeps personal items in the office’s lockers but mostly leaves little behind. If it weren’t for the strangers coming in the rest of the week, he added, he would leave books and papers on his desk.

“It actually keeps the space from becoming more of a mess,” he said.

Write to Konrad Putzier at [email protected]

Thousands of companies across the U.S. are still grappling with exactly how much office space they need when many employees are in the workplace only part of the week. A growing number of companies now let their employees work part time from home but still want them to be together in the office at least a few days a week to foster collaboration. That means offices are either mostly full or mostly empty, depending on the day of the week.

Enter Codi. The flex-office-space company manages about 50 furnished, private offices and coordinates office sharing so that the same set of desks, huddle rooms, whiteboards and snacks can be used by two to three different companies that occupy that same space on different days of the week.

These arrangements, which are something like a timeshare rental for offices, mean companies pay only for those days when their offices are likely occupied. About 35% of Codi’s customers lease an office for fewer than five days a week, said Chief Executive

Christelle Rohaut.

The office timeshare concept doesn’t work for everyone. It is geared toward smaller companies and startups that do most of their work on laptops and don’t store sensitive information in bulky servers or filing cabinets.

“We have everything in the cloud anyway,” said

Piero Molino,

CEO of machine-learning-platform startup Predibase, which pays roughly $6,000 a month to use a Codi office in downtown San Francisco every Tuesday and Wednesday. The company has 25 employees, with about half based in the Bay Area and around eight who come in on a typical Tuesday, he said.

At Frontier, a job-recruitment company, founder

Elliot O’Connor

was working remotely during the pandemic in a variety of apartments when he realized he missed not having an office.

“I’ve just been spending crazy amounts of time in my bedroom for the last two years,” he said. “I just felt like I needed a change.” Getting a membership at a co-working space was an option, but Mr. O’Connor preferred a private office that would be his alone when he was in the building.

But because Mr. O’Connor is the only one of Frontier’s 20 employees based in the Bay Area, he had little interest in coming to the office five days a week, or for spending money on more days than he needed.

“If we’re not going to need it, then we may as well not pay for it,” he said.

So he settled on the San Francisco office, a roughly 900-square-foot ground-floor space with a big table and a kitchen. Frontier pays about $1,500 a month for the space on a three-month lease.

Mr. O’Connor said he doesn’t even know who occupies his space on Tuesday and Friday. He suspects that one tenant is a food-delivery startup, based on scribbles left behind on the office’s whiteboard. He said the space’s three users do a good job of keeping it clean and throwing away trash at the end of the day, and the only items left behind by the other tenants are monitors.

“We’re all adults,” he said.

For some companies, cutting back on days means they can afford more space. Fuzzy, a pet-telehealth company based in San Francisco, initially sought a 2,000-square-foot office, said the company’s general counsel,

Dave Toomey.

It is now leasing about 3,000 square feet—but only for Tuesdays and Wednesdays. At roughly $8,000 a month, the price tag is about half of what a similar office would cost under a traditional lease, Mr. Toomey said.

Like Mr. O’Connor, Predibase’s Mr. Molino said he has no clue who the office’s other tenants are. The office has a fridge, and food left behind by yesterday’s occupier is fair game in keeping with the arrangement’s sharing spirit, he said. “We’re not going to fight over a granola bar,” he said.

Mr. Molino sometimes keeps personal items in the office’s lockers but mostly leaves little behind. If it weren’t for the strangers coming in the rest of the week, he added, he would leave books and papers on his desk.

“It actually keeps the space from becoming more of a mess,” he said.

Write to Konrad Putzier at [email protected]