Coworking provider Common Desk is continuing its rapid expansion in Houston with its first suburban outpost set to open this month in Spring.

The roughly 26,000-square-foot space in the City Place development is to come online just as flexible office space is expected to rise in popularity as hybrid work arrangements spur some companies to rethink their use office space. An August 2022 survey by real estate firm JLL of more than 1,000 corporate executives found that about 43 percent of companies plan to boost their investments in flexible office space through 2025. And more than half of executives surveyed by the real estate firm CBRE last spring said they anticipated relying on flexible office space for a large portion of their future office space needs.

Common Desk’s parent company, WeWork, has been closing underperforming locations across the U.S. even as its membership count grows, company executives told investors in a third-quarter earnings call.

The coworking brand has been expanding in Houston during the pandemic, including recently signing a deal to grow its footprint by nearly 50 percent at the Ion in Midtown. And in November, Common Desk debuted its downtown location in POST Houston.

The Spring site will be Common Desk’s sixth in the region and its farthest from the city’s core, but it won’t be isolated. City Place, formerly known as Springwoods Village, sees a daily workforce of about 21,000 people, according to Patrinely Group, its developer. It’s also home to corporate operations of Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Exxon Mobil and Southwestern Energy.

The 2,000-acre master-planned community includes 4.75 million square feet of office space, a bevy of dining, retail and fitness options, luxury apartments, a Star Cinema Grill dine-in theater and a 150-acre nature preserve. Once built out, the development is expected to have more than 2,500 single family homes, too, City Place developers have said.

“As Common Desk continues to grow into experiential assets across Houston, City Place became the clear choice for a suburban location in Spring,” Dawson Williams, Common Desk’s head of real estate, said in a statement. “The building, ownership and mixed-use development all align with exactly what we’re looking for in a new location.”

The City Place location features two floors of workspaces, five conference rooms, 62 private offices, five office suites, shared working spaces and a furnished terrace on the second floor.

The Spring site is the second Common Desk location at a Patrinely Group project in the Houston area. The other location is 2500 CityWest in Houston’s Westchase District.

As with its other locations, Common Desk formed a partnership with the landlord rather than signing a lease. Instead of signing traditional leases with landlords, Common Desk signs management agreements with a revenue-sharing mechanism so the better the space performs, the more money landlords make.

Patrinely Group is part of the joint venture developing City Place along with USAA Real Estate and CDC Houston.