If you’ve spent any time in commercial real estate investing, the pain points are familiar. Long vacancy periods between tenants. The constant tension between locking in long-term leases for stability and maintaining flexibility to respond to market shifts. Tenants that default, leaving you with months of lost income and a buildout that doesn’t suit the next occupant. Capital improvements that eat into returns.
These aren’t new problems. But they’ve gotten harder to manage. Office vacancy rates in major markets have stayed stubbornly high since 2020, and the commercial office sector has been one of the slowest segments in CRE to recover. Meanwhile, a different corner of the market has been growing at double-digit rates: flexible workspaces. And a growing number of real estate investors are noticing.
Coworking franchises like Venture X give investors a way to participate in commercial real estate through an operating business rather than a pure landlord model. Instead of leasing raw square footage and hoping your tenant sticks around, you’re running a membership-driven workspace that generates recurring revenue from dozens or hundreds of professionals. It’s a fundamentally different approach to making money from commercial space, and for many investors, the economics are starting to look more attractive than traditional CRE plays.
The math that’s shifting: traditional CRE vs. coworking
In a traditional commercial office lease, you’re renting space to one or a handful of tenants on multi-year terms. Your revenue per square foot is fixed by the lease rate, and your upside is limited by what the market will bear at renewal. Vacancy hits hard because a single tenant departure can eliminate 30–50% of your income overnight.
Coworking inverts this model. You’re subdividing the same square footage into private offices, shared desks, virtual memberships, conference rooms, and event spaces, and selling access to each at a markup over your per-square-foot cost. The result is higher revenue density. A 15,000-square-foot coworking space serving 80+ members and dozens of drop-in users can generate more revenue per square foot than the same space leased to a single corporate tenant. And because your member base is diversified across many small accounts, losing any single member barely moves the needle.
Venture X’s franchise investment model is structured to capitalize on this density advantage. Franchisees generate income from multiple revenue streams: private office rentals, dedicated desk memberships, shared desk access, virtual office subscriptions, conference room bookings by the hour, event space rentals, and business service add-ons. Each square foot of your space is monetized in multiple ways.
Coworking vs. other CRE investment vehicles
Real estate investors evaluating coworking typically compare it against a handful of other options. Here’s how those comparisons play out.
Triple-net (NNN) lease properties
NNN leases are the passive investor’s standard: a single tenant (pharmacy, fast food chain, dollar store) on a long-term lease where the tenant pays taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Returns are predictable but modest, typically in the 5–7% cap rate range for quality tenants. The appeal is simplicity. The downside is limited upside. Your return is locked for years, and if the tenant leaves, you’re sitting on a purpose-built box that’s expensive to re-tenant. Coworking offers higher revenue potential per square foot with more operational involvement. It’s not as passive as NNN, but the earnings ceiling is considerably higher.
Self-storage facilities
Self-storage has been a darling of CRE investors for a decade, and with good reason: it’s recession-resistant, operationally simple, and generates consistent cash flow. But the sector is becoming increasingly competitive. Markets that were underserved five years ago are now saturated with new builds, compressing returns. Coworking occupies a different demand curve. The flexible workspace market is still early in its growth trajectory, projected to grow from roughly $20 billion in 2023 to more than $48 billion by 2030. For investors looking at where the growth is heading rather than where it’s already been, coworking is a more compelling entry point right now.
Multifamily residential
Multifamily apartments remain a strong asset class, but entry costs have risen dramatically. Cap rates have compressed, and in many markets you’re paying historically high prices per unit. For investors who don’t want to deploy $5–10 million on a single asset, coworking offers a way to participate in commercial real estate with a total initial investment starting around $340,750 for a Venture X franchise, before concessions or financing. The barrier to entry is significantly lower while still providing exposure to recurring, lease-type revenue.
Why franchise-backed coworking beats going independent
Some real estate investors consider opening an independent coworking space, skipping franchise fees and royalties. On paper, the savings look appealing. In practice, independent operators face steep challenges that franchise owners avoid entirely.
Building a brand from scratch in coworking is expensive and slow. Enterprise clients, who represent the most stable and highest-spending segment of the market, evaluate workspace providers based on brand reputation, national presence, and service consistency. An independent space in suburban Dallas is competing for these clients against established names with dozens of locations. A Venture X franchisee in the same market carries the weight of 70+ locations worldwide and the brand recognition that comes with being part of the Vast Coworking Group, the largest privately owned coworking franchise network globally.
Beyond branding, Venture X’s operational support eliminates the guesswork that sinks many independent spaces. Site selection backed by demographic and demand research. A proven floor plan methodology that allocates 85–90% of space to private offices (where the best margins are). Pre-built marketing and sales systems. Technology infrastructure. And ongoing coaching that helps you optimize occupancy and revenue month over month.
For a real estate investor, this is the difference between buying an asset and buying an asset with an operating playbook. You can see how Venture X compares against other coworking franchise models on the Venture X blog.
The suburban opportunity that most CRE investors are overlooking
Here’s something worth paying attention to: secondary and suburban markets now account for nearly half of all flexible office space, and that share is growing. As remote and hybrid work become permanent fixtures of how companies operate, professionals don’t want to commute 45 minutes to a downtown high-rise just to work at a shared desk. They want a professional workspace close to home.
This trend is a natural fit for real estate investors who already understand suburban commercial markets. If you own or have owned retail plazas, suburban office parks, or mixed-use properties, you already know how to evaluate locations, negotiate leases, and assess local market demand. Coworking adds a higher-value use case to the kind of commercial space you’re already familiar with.
Venture X has designed its model to work across location types, from freestanding office buildings to retail plazas and suburban commercial centers. The brand’s target markets page outlines available regions both domestically and internationally, and the 2025 coworking trends data supports what many investors are already seeing on the ground: suburban and secondary markets represent the next wave of coworking growth.
Scaling through multi-unit ownership
Real estate investors think in portfolios, not single assets. This is where the coworking franchise model gets particularly interesting. Once your first location reaches stabilized occupancy, you can replicate the model in adjacent markets, leveraging the same systems, the same team structure, and the same brand to grow without starting from scratch each time.
Venture X offers significant franchise fee discounts for multi-unit owners, and the company’s team has extensive experience helping franchisees open and operate multiple locations simultaneously. For investors accustomed to building a portfolio of assets over time, this is familiar territory. The mechanics of scaling are the same; the asset class is different.
You can also take the virtual tours of existing Venture X locations to get a sense of the build quality and member experience across different markets.
Is coworking right for your portfolio?
Coworking isn’t a fit for every real estate investor. If you want zero operational involvement and purely passive income, NNN properties or REITs are more appropriate. Coworking is an operating business. Even in a semi-absentee model with a hired manager, you’ll need to stay engaged with performance metrics, membership growth, and strategic decisions.
But if you’re the kind of investor who wants to actively build value in a commercial asset, who sees the structural shift toward flexible work and wants to get ahead of it, and who has the capital and appetite to own a premium business in a growth market, coworking deserves serious consideration. The Venture X franchise opportunity is worth evaluating alongside your next CRE deal.
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