Seven Years Of WorkEZ: What We Have Built Since September 2019

WorkEZ is seven years old this week. The company started operations on 20 September 2019 with one building in Chennai and an idea that was not unusual at the time: that companies would rather rent a finished, serviced floor than sign a lease and build one.

What was unusual was the timing. Six months into the first year, offices across India closed, and they stayed closed or half-empty for the better part of two years. A company whose entire product is the office had picked the twelve months before the office stopped being a place people went.

This post is a look back at what happened after that, written mostly from the public record rather than from memory. The company page carries the current numbers, and the centre list carries the buildings.

An office company that opened a year before offices closed

The first year was a normal start-up year, and then it was not. Through 2020 the floors were fitted, serviced and empty. Nothing about a managed office model is cheap to hold empty, because the fit-out capital is already spent and the building still has to be run.

Two things came out of that period that still shape how the company works:

1. The first is that the operating side of the business, the part clients do not see, was built under conditions where there was nothing to do but run buildings properly. 
2. The second is a bias towards signing what can be filled rather than what can be announced, which is the reason the centre count has grown more slowly than the square footage.

By September 2022, three years in, the position was public. WorkEZ was running seven centres in Chennai, over six lakh square feet, and more than 12,000 seats, and had just signed another 1.9 lakh square feet across Pallavaram, Guindy and Anna Salai, adding close to 4,000 seats.

Asked in the seventh-anniversary film when he first realised WorkEZ could become something much bigger, Sunil Reddy does not name a moment. He names a rate. 

The first two or three years ran at 100 to 150 per cent, he says, and every year since then at 40 to 50 per cent.

That is an unusual answer to that question, and it is the more honest one. There was no moment. There was a compounding rate that did not break, including through the two years when it had every reason to.

Pic.: Mr. Y S Sunil Reddy, Chairman, in the seventh-anniversary film.

What we said in 2022, and what the numbers say now

The clearest way to see seven years is to put the 2022 announcement next to today, because both sets of numbers are published.

The 2022 figures come from the announcement of the Pallavaram, Guindy and Anna Salai signings, made on 7 September 2022. The 2026 figures are the ones on our own company page.

Between those two dates, the portfolio crossed 1.6+ million square feet, including committed developments, across 12 operational buildings and one under development. That release also carried the Kochi entry, 37,748 square feet with Lulu Developers, and the second Coimbatore phase of 0.4 million square feet with Veeras Infra.

Prathap Murali, who joined from JLL, WeWork and Smartworks and is now CEO, put the 2022 view of the market plainly: “The popularity of coworking and managed office spaces has catapulted in the post-COVID era.” That turned out to be true, and it is also the reason the market was filled with operators, which made the next three years harder rather than easier.

Phillip Daniel, who runs sales, answers the same question from the other side of the desk.

That is the real shift of the seven years in one line. The floor plate got bigger because the client got bigger, and the thing being sold stayed the same.

Pic.: Mr. Phillip Daniel, General Manager, Sales, on how the client walking through the door has changed. 

Why the square footage grew faster than the centre count

Thirteen centres in seven years is a modest number of openings, and the area behind them is not. The reason is that a centre is not a fixed quantity, so counting buildings understates what has been built.

WorkEZ The Address in Pallavaram carries more than 4,400 workstations on its own, which is more than a third of the entire portfolio as it stood in 2022. Counting centres treat that building and a 450-workstation centre as the same event. Counting square feet and workstations, which is what a client actually takes, shows the portfolio roughly tripling in area over the same four years.

Signing fewer and larger buildings is a deliberate choice rather than a consequence. A bigger floor plate is what lets a team of 300 sit in one contiguous block, and it is what lets a team of 50 grow to 150 without moving.

The discipline behind it shows up in the occupancy. Portfolio growth has averaged more than 45 per cent year on year since inception, while occupancy has stayed above 90 per cent across assets, as Sunil Reddy set out in November 2025. Growing and staying full at the same time is the harder of the two.

Why Coimbatore and Kochi came before a second metro

After Chennai and Bengaluru, the next two cities were Coimbatore and Kochi, rather than Hyderabad or Pune. That was a deliberate choice, and the reasoning was set out when the company announced its commitment to Coimbatore.

Satheesh, who leads real estate for the company, described the Coimbatore decision as “a strategic one that enables us to secure prime real estate in Coimbatore’s most promising corridor,” and said the response from enterprise clients had validated the belief that tier-2 cities are the next frontier for managed workspaces in India.

In the anniversary film, he describes what changed in method rather than in map. 

The last test in that list is the one a client feels. 

Read that against the centre count, and it explains it. A corridor with one suitable building is a corridor where a client’s second phase becomes a relocation, so it does not get entered. That test rules out more buildings than it approves, which is why thirteen is a small number and 1.6+ million square feet is not.

Pic.: Mr. Satheash S, VP, Real Estate Portfolio Management and Acquisitions, on what has changed about how a centre gets chosen and built.

Prathap Murali made the same point about demand rather than supply:

The first Coimbatore phase of one lakh square feet was more than 90 per cent pre-committed before launch, which is the part of that claim that can be checked.

The pattern behind both cities is the same. Enterprise teams of 50 to 300 people now open in cities that would not have appeared on a shortlist in 2019, and the constraint they meet there is not talent or cost but supply of finished, serviced floors. We wrote about how that decision plays out between two Tamil Nadu cities in our comparison of Coimbatore and Chennai for a GCC.

What seven years changed about how we build a floor

The biggest change is not visible in any of the numbers above. It is that almost nothing is built to a standard size anymore.

In the early years, the assumption was that demand would arrive in round numbers, so floors were planned in round numbers. It does not. A recent sample of available modules across four centres runs to 30, 31, 35, 35, 39, 46, 50, 90, 145, 160 and 175 seats, because each one is built to the floor plate it sits on rather than to a catalogue. 

Two modules of similar size can also be completely different inside: a 160-seat module carrying four manager cabins, a CEO cabin, phone booths and a demarcated 20-seat office, and a 145-seat module carrying three manager cabins, a conference room and a reception, with no booths at all.

That is what the word managed is doing in managed office space. The floor is specified against a requirement and then run by the operator, which is a different product from a desk in a shared room and a different product again from a bare shell on a lease. We set both comparisons out properly in coworking versus managed office and managed office versus traditional lease.

Balaji R, who works on interior design, describes the same seven years from the drawing board. 

Acoustics and flexibility are the two words in that list worth stopping on. A floor plan only for function seats people. A floor plan for the work seats people who can hear themselves think, and can be re-planned when the team changes shape without the walls having to move.

Pic.: Mr. Balaji R, Assistant Manager, Interior Design, on how the design of a WorkEZ floor has changed. 

The second change is speed. A custom fit-out that once ran as a project of its own is now delivered in 45 days, which is the single thing enterprise clients ask about most often before they ask about price.

What thirteen centres took on the people side

Everything above is buildings. None of it happens without the people who run them, and that side of the growth never appears in a portfolio figure.

Grace Subhashini, who heads human resources, puts it plainly in the anniversary film. 

The job she describes is wider than hiring. 

Pic.: Mrs. Grace Subhashini, Head, Human Resources, on what growing from one centre to thirteen has taken on the people's side. 

Here is why that is the harder half of the problem. A centre manager in Kochi and a centre manager in Pallavaram have to make the same judgement call the same way, on a Tuesday evening, with nobody watching. No process document produces that. It comes from people who have been trained the same way and who have been there long enough to have seen the call made before.

It is also the part that sets the ceiling on growth. A building can be signed in a quarter. A centre team that can open one and run it to the same standard takes longer than that to build, and it is the reason a thirteenth centre is a slower event than a third.

What we are still working on

An anniversary post that lists only wins is not worth reading, so here are three things a client would tell you if you asked them.

The first is consistency itself, which is named as the hardest part of the job by the person whose job it is. Preethi Joshi, who runs centre operations, describes it in the film as 

Pic.: Mrs. Preethi Joshi, AGM, Centre Operations, on the hardest part of holding a standard across 13 centres

Built in deliberately is the right description, and it is also the admission inside it. It takes checklists, training, and audits because it does not hold on its own. Any operator that tells you consistency across thirteen buildings is automatic has either not grown yet or is not measuring.

Twenty-four-hour air conditioning is not a standard inclusion. Lighting and power to the floor stay available around the clock, and after-hours cooling is arranged centre by centre. For a team running a United States or United Kingdom shift, that single line matters more than most of the features on a brochure, and we would rather state it here than have it discovered at handover.

Dedicated server rooms are rare in standing inventory. Of eleven modules in a recent availability sample, one carried a dedicated server room. For a client whose parent company requires a locked communications room inside its own boundary, that has to be designed in at the start rather than found later.