Supply Side Constraint for office listings

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7 Comments

1. 

   Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal January 23, 2015, 9:18 am

   My replies:

   1) Yes, I don’t want strangers and weirdos in my office – irrespective of whether its leased or not

   2) You can’t take chances with property – so be careful when you minimise

   3) Is it even legal? To sublease? 

2. 

   Kunal Bihani January 23, 2015, 9:32 am

   1. Target a niche ..rather than going all out for all empty spaces around. i.e a ecosystem around startups sharing space is much more welcoming and receptive. 

   2. Pics and details do the trick. As a marketplace, you need to invest some resources in making the listing good. This can be in terms of good photographs. Read up on how housing.com did data collation in the early days

   3. Subleasing is illegal. So is AirBnb. Take indemnity or similar agreement with those guys. In most cases, if the environment is good, the landowner is concerned about the payment at end of month.  The issue here would be that the landowners, being of traditional mindset (most of them), they will not appreciate giving space to multiple people. Hence the best bet would be to target a niche to expand first (e.g startup spaces). 

3. 

   Jamsheed Gandhi January 24, 2015, 8:12 am

   for the growth of the coworking space ecosystem – and i have used a few coworking spaces in mumbai and have been exploring starting one up in mumbai and goa –

   a initial meeting with the prospective renter,

   clear rules and guidelines of what goes and what’s not desired (in one co working space that i used, in the contract there was a clause that all office persons should be neatly dressed and clean shaven!!!!!)

   contract and document copy of renter – pan card, aadhar card, passport copy, etc.

   all payments via cheque

   india needs loads of coworking spaces for growth of startups so keep it rocking!!!!! 

4. 

   Karan Ahuja January 24, 2015, 8:27 am

   1. People don’t have a natural mindset to share their offices. Will this change over time through marketing?

   yes – this will change if you match compatible folks with each other :

   programmers with programmers , designers with designers and similar matches.

   programmers with call centre folks

   ---

   danger signs . programmers dont like noise , calls in the background.

   2. We need to collect a lot of space provider info which makes it a long process and these guys are lazy to carry out the entire process. Should we reduce the process at the cost of providing lesser info to the office seekers?

   Hire HSC , SSC passed folks who work in call centres to do this for you . give them a clear easy system to work with .

   make a drone to click photos – automate , algorithimize the process as much as possible at no compromise to quality of data.

   use correlations to solve this where you can .

   make data present on a building, street  level so that all offices in that building get that data filled in .

   use wonobo , google street views where possible.

   ye to solve ho hi sakta hai .

   3. Most of the people have leased spaces, so they are apprehensive of subleasing it to unknown people. How can we create confidence here?

   check legalities , set up meetings with direct owners to ask them if they are interested in earning a bit more .

   my office falls in this category – so if you can call my owner and ask him about this – i will be glad .

   you can say you are doing a survey of the entire building and came across ways to increase rent for the direct owner.

   the only problem is that the delta increase in rent may not be tempting for the direct owner as they treat their offices as sleeping assets .

   many of the direct owners in my building dont even give their offices on rent .

   they say – kisko time hai 5-10 hazaar ke liye agreement kaun banayega 🙂

   i am just too scared to talk to my office direct owner about subrenting as dont wish to be kicked out . LOL 

   This could be an opportunity for mycuteoffice.

   solving it at direct owner level is the key .

   also – these guys like bulk cash . so if you can pay them upfront for the entire year and then keep subrenting it as much as you like .

   then their smirks might turn to smiles 🙂

   TC , cheers mate,

   Karan

5. 

   Abhishek Barari January 27, 2015, 8:36 am

   Hi Alok,

   Thanks a lot for the feedback. Means a lot to us.

   With regards your first point, I think that has been one of the key tipping points for us. Do you think getting a general insurance, doing a background check/ filtering of requests or only providing spaces through referrals can be a workaround?

   With respect to the legality of sub-leasing it depends on the agreement + rapport shared by the owner and the lessee. Sub-leasing is not illegal per se unless and until the agreement so specifies. This is because leasing does not fall into tenancy, and we have recently started seeing people being more open to it.

   Also, will keep the second point in mind.

6. 

   Abhishek Barari January 27, 2015, 8:41 am

   Hey Kunal,

   Thanks a lot for the feedback.

   1. That is a good idea. In fact we are trying to do that by only targeting partly occupied furnished facilities.

   2. Design based thinking is what we will be working on now as you said. But we cannot follow the route of housing.com by trying to take photographs etc. Instead we are focussing on better UX like 42floors.com

   3. Well, it’s not really illegal per se. But ya, we are trying to cover the base with indemnity and advance payment collection. Startup Spaces are primary in our radar as well.

7. 

   Abhishek Barari January 27, 2015, 8:45 am

   Hey Jamsheed!

   Thanks a lot for your feedback and encouragement. As an entrepreneur I think this a big problem many of face. Which is why we decided to push on and execute it.

   All your points are really valid and most of them we are trying to push through the systems. Just the initial meeting part is a bit tricky, so we are trying to keep a trial based system.

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