Franchisees are building Flex's recovery, and carrying its risk

After selling PlanHub, the software platform commercial contractors use to bid on jobs, to a private equity buyer, Kevin Priddy went looking for a business to run and settled on coworking. Priddy Spaces, founded in 2022, has opened 12 Venture X and Office Evolution franchise locations, and metro Atlanta is its newest market: a debut branch at 1100 Circle 75 Parkway next to The Battery Atlanta opened in July, with signed deals for Regions Plaza in Midtown, set to open in December, and 5155 Peachtree Parkway at the Forum retail center in Peachtree Corners, slated for early next year.

His read on demand is suburban and narrow — a technology workforce that no longer commutes to a downtown tower, plus what he describes as an AI-driven wave of founders signing for space. His plan is to open four locations a year and reach 50 in operation, doing it as a franchisee of the private equity-backed Vast Coworking.

The market he is buying into is larger than the brand names suggest and far less consolidated: CoworkingCafe, a Yardi subsidiary, counted 8,973 U.S. coworking locations in January, 15% more than a year earlier, and put the total footprint at 160 million square feet, up 16% from January 2025. WeWork, IWG and Industrious supply the headlines, but nearly 80% of the market belongs to independent operators, according to CoworkingCafe, and the small end is where the count compounds, with operators running 10 or fewer locations climbing from roughly 3,300 in 2024 to nearly 4,500.

Wybo Wijnbergen, a former WeWork executive who founded the Amsterdam-based infinitSpace in 2020, is attacking the same demand from the other side of the table: after entering the U.S. last year with a Los Angeles location, his company plans 30 sites across New York, Seattle, Austin and San Francisco within two years, all under management contracts with landlords rather than locations of its own. "There's more demand than there's current supply," he told Bisnow, a claim from an operator selling the model.

Location counts don't carry price: the growth being reported is square footage and sign-ups, not rents, and the two channels expanding here both route the real estate decision through a third party — a franchisee, a manager — rather than through a brand's own balance sheet, which in the management-contract case leaves the landlord holding the space. The next flex shakeout, then, will be distributed rather than concentrated, spread across hundreds of small operators and the landlords who chose a contract over a tenant, arriving as vacancy on a rent roll instead of a line item in someone's earnings. When a flex box does empty, it re-enters the market as ordinary office, which is the exercise Denver is running with a 107,000-square-foot former WeWork up for sale carrying a $40 million cost basis and no asking price.

If the sub-10-location cohort stalls below 4,500 in the next CoworkingCafe count, the franchise arithmetic is the first thing that breaks, and the suburban Sun Belt offices it filled will be the first thing that empties.