Searching for Flexibility in Corporate Real Estate Portfolio: Six Co-Working Strategies for User Corporations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The Author/s presented research relevant to the analyses corporate real estate portfolio versus co-working strategies as  the  main  office  location  or  as  a temporary or complementary space solution.

The topic of the research is vital in wider international discussions. Paper comprehensively introduces the theme. However findings were presented in not entirely sufficient way.

In order to research transform into more up-to-date form the findings/recommendations/conclusions related to the current (very difficult or uncertain) situation of office real estates needs to be clarified or amended.

Below a minor comments to the specific assumption:

• In the paper there is lack of hypotheses or thesis,
• The research has lacks of assessment and recommendation of the discussed corporate strategies in the face of a completely different state and situation of corporate and office real estate due to COVID-19. Many reports assume that the situation will never return to its original pre-pandemic state, so it is imperative to refer to this situation in an article.It should also be mentioned that this type of real estate is in a very difficult situation today, and remote work is becoming more common, and the recommendation of a potential strategy could be a very valuable scientific study.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and careful reading. We are pleased to hear that the importance of the topic is acknowledged. 

Based on the review, most of the revision effort is aimed to clarify the results and research limitations including the impact of COVID-19 pandemic to corporate real estate: the result tables are adjusted and re-positioned and text is added to explain more the differences between each of the strategy to increase the transparency of the analysis.  Also the research limitations are further elaborated under the Discussion section.

It was stated in the review that the paper has lack of hypothesis. Due to the qualitative nature of the research, we have not explicitly formulated a hypothesis. The underlying hypothesis is that the corporations have variety of approaches to use co-working space. 

With this revision, we hope that the manuscript meets the quality standards of the review.

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, a very interesting study and a valuable addition to a limited co-working literature available. I am, however, a bit concerned about the sample size (5 case studies and 5 interviews). Thus, I recommend addressing this limitation in your discussion too. 
For further improvements of your work, few minor remarks from my behalf: 

• First, your abstract refers to 6 qualitative-case studies but your article discusses 5, so please check that. 
• Second, the theoretical background could be improved by, e.g. introducing more about the role of flexibility in CRE portfolio. Also, co-working offering (introduced also in the Fig. 1) is unclear to me. So recommend to have another look to it. 
• Third, your research methodology chapter suggests this paper being as a suggestive theory for further theory building. This in unclear to me. What theory building? What theory do you suggest? In this paper, I do not see a new theory being built. It is rather providing insights to further CRE strategy development. Please also consider expanding on the use of other supportive materials (next to interviews) in your methodology and result description.
• Next, Table 2 was hard to follow and there was a need to look into appendix table in the Results section. Consider which table is more informative or if Table 2 needs to be changed as it is quite confusing. 
• Finally, it is a bit unclear how authors end up particularly with these 6 strategies as it seems to me now that it is done due to differences in motivation (from Table 2). Other differences seem to appear due to physical flexibility, financial flexibility, portfolio role and organisation's maturity stage. I recommend to look at the structure of results' presentation to make sure the reader can follow the logic and argumentation why these particular six strategies appear and the differences between them.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and careful reading. We are pleased to hear that the importance of the topic is acknowledged. 

Based on the review, most of the revision effort is aimed to clarify the results and research limitations including the impact of COVID-19 pandemic to corporate real estate: the result tables are adjusted and re-positioned and text is added to explain more the differences between each of the strategy to increase the transparency and readability of the analysis.  Also the research limitations are further elaborated under the Discussion section.

Other comments:

• The abstract is updated regarding the number of cases. We apologise the mistake in the previous version.
• It was suggested to focus more on flexibility in the CRE portfolio in the theory section. The chapter 2.2 includes a narrative (approx. 800 words) of different flexibility demands in the context of CRE. Therefore, we don’t fully understand this comment. If the chapter does not fulfil the quality requirements as it is, we are prepared to revise the section based on further comments.
• The phrasing in research methods is checked and adjusted based on the comments.

With this revision, we hope that the manuscript meets the quality standards of the review.