Happy Birthday Choregus
August 27th, 2008 | by Samantha Middleton
Well, today is the first anniversary of Choregus office space news.
This time last year, the creators of the site decided that the office space world needed an injection of independent news as well as a mix of information aimed at businesses looking for office space.
So, what has happened during the past 365 days and 1027 news articles?
We have seen a general overall improvement of information from office space providers. Information given to potential clients is now much better than it was a year ago. We would like to take a little bit of credit for this.
We have seen a community build over this past year. From a very fractured group of companies, there now seems to be a circle forming, which again is good to see. This bodes well for the future of the serviced office industry.
There have been several instances of other sites emulating Choregus News. Some have done it very well indeed, whereas some (brokers?) have been, well, just laughable and it seems that they will never learn. Copying ideas without a passion is a fruitless exercise. Your hearts have to be in it, guys.
There is definitely a trend that we see in this industry online, after watching it for a year. There are some that want to make a change, but their companies can sometimes hold them back, there are those that go ahead and make those changes, with some great results, and there are some companies within this industry that just simply do all the wrong things and never seem to move forward.
Thankfully, the latter category of companies is not that great in number.
Generally, the serviced office industry online is moving forward at a quicker pace than it did a year ago and we think that we helped to force this change by being a little different and controversial when we thought it was necessary.
Offline has seen a few things change and a few things stay the same:
Regus is still the daddy of serviced office space and still steadily growing, but is now expanding its portfolio of services, using its stock very cleverly indeed to provide a range of services that only they can offer due to the size of the company and the number of centres that it operates. They do serviced offices better than anyone else and I have yet to see anyone do as good a job as them on a large scale.
MWB have the best marketing arm in the industry and I expect big things from them in the next 12 months on the web. If endeavor matches ambition then they will be the major force of operators online this time next year.
Yourspace are very quickly becoming the most innovative company when it comes to offerings for office space clients. The brains behind the company is an outsider to the industry and his ideas are very refreshing indeed.
United Business Centres are growing at an alarming rate, firmly putting themselves on the UK office space map. Philip Grace is a busy man!
eOffice are still the kings of style and I don’t think they will ever lose this crown! Pier Paulo Mucelli is the Gianni Versace of the office space world!
Some notable smaller operators include Anvic for their extremely stylish brand of offices and John Nash of ItsTheWorks (Manchester), who has to be the most web-savvy centre manager in the UK, which is proving dividends for his business centre.
So what for the next 12 months?
We will continue to write news about the industry, being a little controversial, profiling some important industry characters, making fun of others - pretty much what we have done so far!
As for the credit crunch - we don’t care at the moment, we are celebrating. We will deal with that later.
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One Response to “Happy Birthday Choregus”
By John Nash on Aug 27, 2008 | Reply
Happy Birthday!
The site is always a good read, a fantastic source of information, and an asset to the industry.
Best of luck for your second year.