Co-Work LatAm, with 18 locations, expanding in Miami

Latin America’s largest rental co-working space company is looking to expand through seven new locations in South Florida after opening its first US location in Brickell in December.

Co-Work LatAm, which has 18 locations in Chile – its country of origin – five in Colombia, two in Uruguay, one in Mexico and now one in Brickell, is expecting to double its footprint in 2022 to 50 offices across the Americas, it recently announced.

Additional 50 locations over the next three years are expected, the company said, focusing on Tampa, Orlando, Houston and Atlanta, an expansion of 60 locations and almost 600,000 square feet of co-working space, and 1.4 million square feet of space globally.

“Our idea was always to congregate all the smaller countries [of Latin America] under the same net,” said Horacio Justiniano, partner and co-CEO of Co-Work LatAm. “In 2019, instead of opening in Mexico, we looked at Miami because many of our clients were thinking about opening businesses there, people from Uruguay, Colombia and Chile.”

Co-work LatAm, founded in 2011, started out of the business failure of a toy selling company in Santiago. “We had bankrupted after the earthquake in Chile (in 2010), and we stayed with 40,000 toys without selling,” Mr. Justiniano said. “One of the things we failed at was not knowing about the industry, not talking with anyone from the industry, not being involved in the day-to-day, and we came up with a space where we all could be together to answer all those basic questions in the same place. That’s the co-working.”

The Santiago-based company is looking to total almost 55,000 square feet of co-working office space, concentrating on South Florida first. “We’re developing, and months away, from opening a second Brickell location in 1220 Brickell Ave., on the 24th floor, and we’re opening in two weeks a Wynwood location,” said Mr. Justiniano. “Others that are in negotiations to sign a lease are in Coral Gables and Midtown.”

Its current Brickell location is a 7,500-square-foot site on the fourth floor of 25 SW Ninth St., which debuted in December after the Covid-19 pandemic delayed its opening efforts.

“We decided it in 2019, got a lease approved in March 2020, and then the pandemic came,” he said. “The borders were closed in Chile and we couldn’t go to the US to start construction or habilitation of the space. Instead of being six to eight months to open shop, it took us a year and a half.”

In addition to co-working space, which includes open spaces, private offices, launch spaces and flex space, small conference rooms that fit up to 10 to 30 people at a market rate of $75 for some hours in the month and about $550 for a private studio space, according to Mr. Justiniano, the company has another line of business called “offices and services.”

“We look for a location, we decide the layouts, we do the permitting, we habilitate it and then we operate it,” he said. “We operate it to the point of providing assistants for the office day-to-day, and other all-inclusive services. In Miami we saw that this was a boom; client that we start with, client that closes.”

Co-work LatAm, Mr. Justiniano said, is hoping to have 30% of its market in co-working and 70% in offices and services.

The company, in addition, has associated with non-profit national association Endeavor to help entrepreneurs and startups in the co-working space connect with financing services and other startups around the world.