Tribuapp rents out empty office spaces due to remote work to third parties

Can you imagine working in the center of Barcelona and paying 10 euros an hour in an office of the 500 square meters of office space that Hard Rock Café has in the building it occupies in Plaça Catalunya or on the eleventh floor of Torre Urquinaona, on the corner of Ronda Sant Pere with Plaza Urquinaona? Well, nothing easier than renting it through Tribuapp, a startup that manages flexible workspaces.

The pandemic and the emergence of teleworking are the raison d'être of this project that two young entrepreneurs, Oriol Torremadé and Rafael Castilla, have brought forward, after their first steps in the real estate sector working at Brickbro. "We are a prop tech business model that, unlike the real estate sector in general, is not capital intensive," explains Torremadé, because they only manage the workspaces that companies or individuals want to lease to third parties.

They realized, they say, that the offer of coworking spaces was excessively expensive and was not located in the most central areas of large cities and decided to "change the paradigm of this segment of activity," making available to companies, freelancers, and liberal professionals "a decent, practical, flexible, well-located, and very quick to book workspace, as well as economical." However, they don't like labels and shy away from being treated as a low-cost coworking, because "we are more than that," emphasizes Rafael Castilla and says that they offer "areas with opportunities to create knowledge in a professional environment."

The co-founder of Tribuapp argues that the 18 office spaces in Barcelona and the eight in Madrid, with 3,500 square meters of surface area and about 700 work positions, have an average occupancy of 90% "because we add value to a user who finds us only 10 minutes from where they are at the time of making the reservation."

The rental can be by the hour or for more stable periods, but "always at affordable prices," says Rafael Castilla and explains, as an anecdote, that to set the rates they asked users of places like the Starbucks chain, "a workplace for many nomadic employees" what they consumed for being there eight hours and "they confirmed that only a coffee." Therefore, "Tribuapp's most accessible all-inclusive monthly subscription costs 74 euros," he says with a smile.

For its part, the landlord is guaranteed that Tribuapp is responsible for adapting and updating the facilities and maintaining them. "We are a safer alternative for individuals who do not want to rent out a property they have in disuse but who do want to perceive a return," explains Oriol Torremadé. For this reason, the company also looks for vertical properties, which allow it to have a grouped offer. An example is found at number 190 Calle Pau Claris, in Barcelona, ​​where they already have 1,000 square meters spread over three floors.

Two years after its creation in the midst of the pandemic, in July 2020, they have just opened a new division of the business: the management of workspaces that many companies or offices have unemployed because they are applying the full or hybrid teleworking formula for some of their workers, "and the facilities are becoming too big for them, with the cost that this entails, but at the same time they do not want to move so as not to lose a central location," explains Oriol Torremadé.

The platform gives these companies the opportunity to rent these empty square meters, generating new income for their business and avoiding the need to look for another office adapted to the new labor reality. In this case, these young entrepreneurs do not mind being attributed the epithet of "the Airbnb of offices," because the companies or individuals who become part of Tribuapp have "new income just for giving a use to what they do not use," with contracts lasting five years.

The company has 3,500 square meters distributed in 26 offices between Barcelona and Madrid

The expansion will be accompanied by an increase in staff at its Barcelona headquarters, which will grow from 14 to 22 employees, with new positions for programmers, sales team, and business developers. "We want to improve the platform to be even more efficient with centralized management from Barcelona," they assure.