25 Cities, 4X YOY Growth, 220+ Monthly Transactions: Qdesq Is Taking The Flexible Workplace Segment By Storm

Recently, it was reported that Walmart-owned Flipkart, which has a 30-floor office in Bengaluru with a seating capacity of more than 7,300, is in talks with many coworking space providers for placing 3,000 employees in the city itself. Other corporates like Twitter, Jaguar, Land Rover, GoDaddy, and Discovery India are also tapping into India’s coworking options.

In recent years, India has developed a strong coworking culture. Big companies like WeWork, Regus, Awfis, 91 Springboard, and Innov8, along with emerging players such as Skootr, Workfella, GoHive, and GoWork are creating a major impact in the space.

With the emergence of shared offices and coworking spaces in India, the definition of the workplace has changed. They are taking away the monotony of traditional workspaces with cool, value-added features such as indoor games, lounge areas, cafés, nap rooms, breakout zones, mini-bars, gyms, Jacuzzi, and more. And the best part is that companies opting for them don’t have to worry about their maintenance.

Some coworking space providers are discoverable online but the entire spectrum on one platform and a true marketplace to make a decision and have a right solution This is where the need for a centralised platform such as Qdesq arises.

Founded in 2015 by Paras Arora and Lavesh Bhandari, Qdesq is an online aggregator of coworking spaces, shared workspaces, managed workplaces, virtual offices, and individual offices. Qdesq helps people from startup founders and freelancers to established entrepreneurs and corporates, offering hassle-free, ready to use, plug-and-play workplaces.

Qdesq is a one-stop workspace rental platform which is making the workplace search smarter and simpler. It often becomes a challenge for office space occupiers and seekers to look out for the perfect workplace based on their needs and budget. They often struggle to make time to visit each place that offline brokers offer. Qdesq understands this and is steadily simplifying the workplace needs of both startups and corporates.

Qdesq is marrying technology with brokerage in the real-estate sector to make office space search as simple as a tap on your screen. It has taken the pain out of searching for the right workspace, addressing client concerns and queries, and offering them the best-in-class workplace as per their needs, pricing, location, configuration, and company growth curve.

From aggregating coworking spaces, on demand hot desks, virtual offices, individual offices for both startups and enterprises, Qdesq offers them all.  Moreover, the company’s own proprietary CRM simplifies the process further and helps it keep a track of all its deals, thereby keeping the process at Qdesq streamlined.

Qdesq: A One-Stop Solution for Workplace Rental Services

Headquartered in Gurugram, Qdesq offers rental services in 32 India cities including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad among many others. It partners with India’s most well-known coworking partners such as WeWork, Awfis, Skootr, Innov8, 91 springboard, and Cowrks, as well as 1,500 other venue partners, semi-branded and neighbourhood coworking spaces, shared corporate offices, hotels, serviced offices operated by landlords across India.

It understands its clients’ demands and offers customised workspace rental solutions complemented with comparative pricing and live assistance to understand clients’ needs and offer them the right solution.

It counts among its clients a number of leading startups such as ClearTax, Autoninja, and NowFloats, along with small and medium-sized businesses. Also, the likes of global giants and large corporates such as Expedia, Jefferies, Tripadvisor, Google, Avaya, Worldpay, Siemens, Zomato, Flipkart, and Hyundai trust on Qdesq’s assistance for their on demand or long term workspace solutions. Or even a customised private managed office as large as 100 seater solution.

With a 4X YoY growth, Qdesq is setting a benchmark in the commercial real-estate sector.

Flexible Workspaces: The Choice Of Startups & Corporates

Startups’ attraction for shared workspaces is understandable — they offer them the chance to launch operations with negligible investment, along with affordable pricing, a redefined work culture that enables employees to network with people from other companies, and more. But, what is driving established corporates with huge workspaces to opt for coworking? The answer is simple — flexibility.

Flexible workspaces offer hassle-free day to day affairs in operations and maintenance, zero capex, zero compliance in maintenance, flexibility in terms of future team development, and premium locations with a productive environment. These are the reasons why major corporates, startups founders, entrepreneurs, and small-medium business enterprises are increasingly looking for flexible workspaces.

Also, lower costs. Given the spiralling real-estate prices in Indian cities it is getting extremely difficult for all kinds of companies to own offices of their own or expand them as they grow. For startups, coworking has emerged as a lifeline while for corporates, it makes economic sense to pay only for the space they need, when they need it.

The flexible workspace concept allows companies to pay per seat instead of the conventional method of paying for sq ft (while renting an entire office space).

Qdesq: Facilitating India’s Flexible Workspace Culture

According to research by Qdesq, the estimated market for flexible workspaces in India is worth $2.2 Bn with 1.779 Mn registered companies and 1.189 Mn active companies, excluding freelancers, sole proprietorship, and partnership firms. The company says that the exponential growth of flexible workspaces in India is being triggered by their inherent benefits — they are ready to use, economical, flexible and scalable expansion or reduction and provide exposure to a diverse workspace community.

Flexible Workspaces Are The Future

From the beginning of 2018, India observed rapid growth in the establishment and performance of flexible workspaces. Such workspaces, complimented with coworking spaces, have come up with innovative ideas, better flexibility, and engaging activities, among others, to be at forefront of the commercial real estate sector.

The founders’ blog at Qdesq says that this is no longer an emerging trend that it is about to take up the office stock. It further adds that flexible workspaces, which comprised 3% of the total office space in 2018, is about to rise to 11% within the next three years.

During a casual chat on why Qdesq thinks flexible workspaces are important, Paras Arora, founder & CEO at Qdesq, tells Inc42, “Flexible workspace is the future with an estimated 30% of real estate being flexible workspaces by 2030. The APAC will be the largest market share-holder of flexible spaces and India alone will hold $5 Bn of the market by 2022.”

With not many competitors in the same race, there is a huge market for Qdesq to explore. The growth strategy of Qdesq is simple: transparency in business practices, regular technological upgradation in the user interface, data points and BI, and understanding of the evolving market dynamics. Though Qdesq doesn’t have any direct competitors, direct online lead flow to coworking spaces and regional local brokers pose indirect competition to the workplace aggregator.

Arora adds, “The future lies in tapping the network and the community, and the factors that can boost business are strategic tie-ups and unbiased and impartial solution to the clients with a one-stop answer to pan India expansion, and tech-enabled offline to online SOP’s. This is how we work and how we are planning to grow in the near future.”

Given the market outlook and the increasing adoption of flexible workspaces by not just startups and SMEs but also by major corporates and enterprises, there’s a huge opportunity for Qdesq to look beyond Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, leading the startup ecosystem and coworking to even in smaller cities.

At the same time, with not many players in the workspace aggregation sector, Qdesq is preparing to expand its services to international shores. And given its innovative approach and first mover advantage, Qdesq looks set to go to these places and more.