Premier Business Centers doesn’t have the Wall Street buzz WeWork Inc. does or brand-new locations in some of Orange County’s recently built or redesigned office developments like some other co-working peers, such as Spaces.
But the Irvine-based executive suites operator has one notable advantage in Orange County over the competitors: a big established presence.
Premier Business Centers has the most OC locations with 15 and the most square footage here at nearly 277,000 square feet, of any co-working company operating here, according to a new report on OC’s fast-growing co-working industry by the Irvine office of brokerage Cushman & Wakefield.
It indicates that by square footage, Premier’s local operations make up about 40% of the 680,000 square feet of co-working space in the county.
Premier is a unit of Irvine-based real estate investor Bascom Group LLC, which was formed in 1996 and is best known for its 18,000-plus-unit apartments portfolio.
Other Bascom units include real estate investment and redevelopment firms, including Realm Group LLC, Shubin Nadal Realty Investors and Real Estate Development Associates LLC, all based in Newport Beach.
Bascom ranks No. 73 on this week’s largest private companies list, with annual revenue of about $248 million.
Expansion Mode
Bascom created Premier in 2002 when it purchased the bankrupt American Office Centers in Irvine. It’s expanded organically and through some other opportune deals. Last year it took over a few area locations of Newport Beach-based Real Office Centers, which gave up its space due to financial issues.
Premier, led by Chief Executive Jeff Reinstein, now has nearly 90 shared workspace locations totaling about 1.5 million square feet, and serves more than 15,000 customers.
It’s nearly doubled its portfolio this decade, and was one of the first big co-working firms in the country to go on an expansion tear in the current market cycle.
It’s a market destined to grow even more, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s new report.
“Co-working has become a new normal, in that it has become an expected and preferred workplace of many of today’s workforce,” particularly among millennials, said Cushman Executive Managing Director Bob Thagard.
Millennials “are motivated by a vastly different kind of work environment,” he said. Today, “it’s all about the ‘experience per square foot.’ Millennials want to feel engaged at work, and they want flexibility in how, where and when they work.”
OC’s co-working space has grown exponentially in the past few years, with more than 200,000 square feet worth of leases signed at high-end office buildings over the past 18 months.
Many of the locations are in Irvine, which is home to 15 of the county’s 28 largest spaces, according to Cushman’s data.
Outside of Premier, the largest co-working space providers are Regus at about 200,000 square feet, and Spaces, at 102,000 square feet. Both firms are owned by Luxembourg-based office landlord IWG.
Spaces offers more cutting-edge architecture and on-site amenities, which come with higher rents than typical Regus locations.
New York-based WeWork has two area locations totaling about 65,000 square feet, and Aliso Viejo-based TechSpace’s area operations exceed 13,000 square feet, according to the report.
Square footage in OC lags in comparison to other area markets. Greater Los Angeles’ operators now offer 3 million square feet, including about 500,000 square feet in downtown L.A., and San Diego has about 1.2 million square feet.
Thagard said that the shared-space industry, while still in its infancy in OC, is “a concept that appears to be in expansion mode.”
