A few years ago, the division of roles in the flexible office market was fairly tidy. The landlord owned the building, and an operator such as Spaces, Regus or Evolve leased an area, fitted it out and sold memberships on. The landlord got a tenant on a long contract, the operator carried the operating risk, and the tenant got flexibility without committing. Everyone had their place in the value chain.
That picture is changing. KLP Eiendom has its own ROM. Thon Eiendom has Thon Flex. Braathen Eiendom is behind Flyt. Höegh Eiendom runs Ö at Solli plass. Schage Eiendom has Arena by Schage in Skøyen Atrium, Ragde Eiendom opened The Box in Sannergata 2 in 2025, and OBOS gathered its entire effort into Collektivet when Construction City at Ulven opened the same year. What they all have in common is that the landlord is no longer content to be just a lessor. They have become the operator themselves.
The question is why. Is it simply an elegant way to fill space that would otherwise sit empty, or are the landlords responding to something tenants actually want? And if you run your own concept, or are considering starting one, what is really the difference between owning the concept yourself and leasing to an operator?
A market under pressure
The backdrop is worth keeping in mind. UNION's most recent coworking survey, with a measurement date of January 2025, describes a market that has tightened considerably. There are 44 operators and around 13,500 flexible workspaces in Greater Oslo. Occupancy has fallen to 69%, down a full 11 percentage points in one year. At the same time, break-even occupancy, the level operators themselves say they need to clear in order to make money, has risen to 82%. The result is uncomfortable: only 40% of the centres report that they are operating profitably, against 70% the year before.
In other words, the typical centre today sits well below its own profitability point. The average price for a private office membership is roughly 8,100 NOK per month, but revenue per available workspace is falling. Operators point to proximity to public transport and a high level of service as the factors that decide the competition, and to small businesses as the most important target group.
The most interesting signal for landlords lies elsewhere in the survey, however. Half of the operators now report increased competition from "ordinary office space", because flexibility in traditional leases has grown. Two years ago, only 16% raised this point. When landlords start offering shorter commitments and softer terms in ordinary premises, they are eating into the market of the pure operators. And when the landlord also builds its own coworking space, it is doing more than competing on terms. It is bringing the entire value chain in-house.
Landlords step onto the field
The trend is not new, but it has accelerated. KLP Eiendom, one of the country's very largest property owners, has run coworking spaces since 2012 and gathered them under the ROM brand, aimed at small businesses and startups. Thon Eiendom launched Thon Flex in 2018, a turnkey concept with furnished offices at central Oslo addresses and three months' mutual notice. Braathen Eiendom started Flyt the same year, and has since expanded to several thousand square metres across Vika and Bjørvika, where the coworking space is bundled with meeting rooms, auditoriums and catering.
In recent years, more have arrived. Höegh Eiendom opened Ö in Parkkvartalet on Parkveien just behind the Royal Palace, and has since expanded to Indekshuset at Solli plass and to Ski. Schage Eiendom offers full-service coworking through Arena by Schage in Skøyen Atrium, one of Oslo's largest office buildings. Ragde Eiendom opened The Box in Sannergata 2 in 2025, a fully renovated landmark building in Grünerløkka that also houses Ragde's own head office on the top floor. And when OBOS opened Construction City at Ulven in August 2025, a building of more than 100,000 square metres, two whole floors were devoted to the coworking space Collektivet, an industry hub for construction, civil engineering and real estate with more than fifty companies already in place.
Norwegian Property, for its part, has run Business Village in the Verkstedhallene at Aker Brygge in-house since 2013, one of the earlier examples of a large, listed landlord taking on the flex role itself. The trend has also long since moved out of the city centre. In Lørenskog, the knowledge hub Lius opened in December 2025, run by the local development network Lørenskog i Utvikling, and filled 1,700 square metres with close to fifty companies in a short time. Lius reminds us that it is not only traditional landlords who build communities, and that flexible concepts are no longer reserved for the most central office addresses.
Why do they do it themselves?
There are two ways to read the motivation, and the truth is probably a mix of both.
The first is defensive. DNB Næringsmegling has found, in its investor survey among the country's largest landlords, that several create their own flex concepts simply because they believe they end up carrying much of the downside anyway when they work with an external operator. The experience of recent years is that the downside protection in a revenue-based agreement can prove weak the moment the market stalls. The reasoning then becomes simple: if we are going to carry the risk regardless, we might as well keep the upside too. Several responded in the survey that if they are going to be in coworking at all, they will do it themselves.
The second reading is offensive. The same landlords believe that tenants' desire for flexibility will only grow, and they want to position themselves to take part in that growth. Nor do they need to make money from day one, the way a hard-pressed operator does. A landlord can see the coworking space as a buffer in the portfolio, a service enhancer for its ordinary tenants and a showcase for the building, while accepting that profitability will come over time.
Höegh Eiendom expresses the offensive logic well. The sales manager for Ö has pointed out that because the company already knows the property trade, it was entirely natural to invest in a coworking space it operates itself. Ö in Parkkvartalet is also built on a hybrid model where ordinary leasing and coworking memberships are offered at the same address. Larger companies get access to meeting facilities as needed, smaller companies get a flexible membership model, and the landlord makes more efficient use of the shared facilities. It is a model that is hard to copy for an operator that controls only one floor on a short-term contract.
The third, more down-to-earth driver should not be underestimated: space that is difficult to lease the conventional way can find new life as a community. But the point in 2026 is that the best concepts are no longer about filling leftover space. They are about owning the entire tenant experience.
The lesson from Evolve and WeWork
To understand why landlords have grown sceptical of the classic operator model, it is enough to look back at 2023. Malling & Co has described the business model precisely: operators borrow long and lend short. They commit to long leases with the landlord, but sell memberships that can be cancelled at a few months' notice. As long as occupancy is high, the maths works. When demand falters, the operator is left with fixed obligations and falling income.
That is exactly what happened. Evolve and its parent company RCR Flex filed for bankruptcy just before Christmas in 2023, and the parent company Recreate was itself declared bankrupt the following spring, with interest-bearing debt in the order of 1.5 billion NOK. Around the same time, WeWork sought bankruptcy protection in the US, and its two Oslo centres on Haakon VIIs gate and Tjuvholmen were closed, with Spaces taking over one of the premises. The paradox is that it was precisely these closures that cleared the supply side and lifted occupancy at the remaining centres towards 80%.
But the Evolve story does not end with the bankruptcy, and that is an important nuance. The concept has been rebuilt, and passed 10,000 square metres in the summer of 2026 after signing new premises in Stavanger. Today Evolve has locations in Oslo, Asker, Tønsberg, Skien and Stavanger, and managing director Andreas Bjørshol points to a clear shift in how companies want to use their offices: more want shorter commitments and access to good facilities without taking on the whole investment themselves.
That tells us two things at once. The demand for flexibility is real and robust enough to carry a rebuild. But the way you finance and structure the risk determines whether you survive a downturn. That is the realisation landlords are now acting on.
Middleman, in-house or pure operator
For a landlord choosing a strategy, there are three realistic positions, and each has its advantages and disadvantages.
Leasing to an operator is the simplest. The landlord avoids operating risk and the need to build expertise, and gets a specialist with a brand and skilled people into the building. The drawback is that the cash flow is only as solid as the operator. If the operator falls, as Evolve and WeWork did, a whole floor can stand empty overnight. One additional point that is easy to overlook: each centre is often organised as a separate company that can be declared bankrupt without dragging the parent down with it.
Running the concept in-house gives the landlord full control and the entire upside, and cuts out a costly middleman. The landlord can offer a softer form of flexibility than the operators' short notice periods, for instance adjusting space later in the tenancy at a cost, and can tie the community closely to the rest of the building's service offering. In return, the landlord has to build a dedicated host function and operating expertise that few property companies have in-house. As UNION has pointed out: just as very few landlords run their hotels themselves, many should think carefully before setting off on a coworking adventure of their own.
The pure operator, such as Spaces and Regus under the IWG umbrella, or an independent player like Share Spaces, has the focus and network effects the landlord lacks. IWG can offer a member access to locations in more than a hundred countries, something a newly established landlord can never match. The weakness is the financial vulnerability of borrowing long and lending short, and that the capital markets have viewed the model more sceptically since 2023. That raises financing costs across the board.
It all hinges on the lease structure
If you are an independent operator, or a landlord choosing to use one, it is the balance in the agreement that decides whether the partnership can withstand a downturn. The lesson of recent years is that a long, fixed lease combined with short, cancellable memberships is a dangerous mix in a market at 69% occupancy.
The movement is therefore towards sharing the risk. A revenue-based lease lets the landlord take part in the upside when the centre does well, but it should always have a floor, a fixed minimum rent that covers the landlord's costs. Without such a floor, the downside protection becomes an illusion, as several landlords learned when the revenue disappeared. Internationally, this has developed quickly: the brokerage Savills and its flex brand Workthere report that management agreements and hybrid models, where landlord and operator share both risk and profit, are now the preferred growth model, and that the share in Europe is expected to pass 70%.
The point is that landlords' own concepts, management agreements and so-called white-label solutions are all growing at the same time. They are three different answers to the same realisation: a straight fixed lease does not distribute the risk correctly in a flex market.
The INC. model: when the caterer takes the space
One of the most interesting players does not fit into any of the usual boxes. INC. is a coworking concept from 4Service, a large Norwegian provider of food and facility management. When Compass Group Norge completed its acquisition of 4Service in early 2025, INC. ended up inside one of the world's largest catering and service groups, with more than half a million employees globally. The distinctive thing is that a service provider here takes on lease space itself and bundles the coworking space with canteen, meeting rooms, conferences and reception.
The pattern recurs in several places. At Skøyen, Fram Eiendom leases out the protected former tram depot at Karenslyst Allé 10, known as Jernstøperiet, to INC., and the service offering runs across four of Fram's buildings in the same street, so that the block functions as one interwoven community. At Hammersborg Torg, OBOS Eiendom has teamed up with INC. on a large area with move-in from 2027, where Compass will also deliver service across the rest of the building.
This differs fundamentally from pure coworking. For an ordinary operator, the office is the product. For INC., the service margin on food, operations and facilities is a central part of the business model, and the office space functions just as much as a channel for selling services. That makes catering and facility players an entirely new kind of competitor, and at the same time a possible partner, for both landlords and pure operators.
Hammersborg in particular holds a fitting irony about where the market is heading. OBOS moved its own head office away from Hammersborg and into Construction City at Ulven, where it runs the coworking space Collektivet itself. Into the vacated space at Hammersborg comes Compass with INC. One landlord takes coworking in-house in its new building, while a catering giant takes over the flex role in the old one. A related picture can be found at Harbitz Torg, where Compass once ran the coworking in Møller Eiendom's building, a space later taken over by Regus. It reminds us that "landlord in-house" is not a one-way trend, but one of several answers living side by side.
What does this mean for the industry?
For a landlord sitting on an attractive building by a transport hub, running it in-house has become a real option, but one that requires taking operations seriously. When break-even is at 82% and average occupancy is 69%, the margin for succeeding on your own is small. That argues for starting small, ideally in space you struggle to lease anyway, and building expertise from there. If you would rather use an operator, the lesson is that the agreement must genuinely share the risk, with a floor that protects the landlord and an upside that motivates the operator.
For the pure operators, the message is that differentiation matters more than volume. The two factors operators themselves rank highest, proximity to transport and level of service, are precisely where landlords and the service-bundled concepts like INC. have their advantages. To defend its place, an independent operator must either match that experience or offer something the landlord cannot, such as a network across cities and countries.
What we are left with is a market that is sorting itself anew. The line between landlord and operator is blurring, and those who succeed are the ones who control most of the tenant experience while having distributed the risk wisely. A couple of figures are worth following. If occupancy crosses back above break-even in the next UNION survey, the profitability picture turns. If the share pointing to competition from ordinary office space keeps rising, it is a sign that landlords' softer flex is gaining ground. Whichever way it goes, it becomes ever more important for a tenant to have someone who knows the whole market, both the pure operators and the landlords' own concepts, and who can tell the difference between a good and a bad offer. That is the job we at Spacefinder do every day.
Sources: UNION's coworking survey (winter 2024 and 2025), DNB Næringsmegling, Malling & Co and Savills/Workthere, as well as the operators' own websites and press releases.
