How JustCo’s Hotel Model Reframes Asia’s Office Market

Flexible workspaces capture just over 5% of Asia-Pacific offices—half the penetration of Europe and the U.S.—yet growth in cities like Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok is accelerating. JustCo, led by founder and CEO Kong Wan Sing, is expanding rapidly across Asia, viewing its business less as traditional office rental and more like a hospitality enterprise similar to hotels.

This shift embeds frontline service and customer care into coworking, unlocking new leverage beyond location and desks. Kong calls it “a hospitality business,” highlighting attention to clients’ experiences and their visitors' needs, driving stickiness and premium pricing.

That hospitality lens creates a system far from commodity office leasing—it's a layered service platform that compounds value across markets from Singapore to Tokyo. “Serving customers this way isn’t just service; it’s strategic leverage,” explains Kong, reframing coworking as experience infrastructure.

Challenging The Commodity-Office Assumption

Conventional wisdom treats coworking as flexible real estate with desks by the hour or day—pure commoditized space competing on price and location. Analysts see the sector as cost-cutting for tenants and risky for providers amid hybrid work’s rise. This overlooks how embedding hospitality acts as constraint repositioning, shifting the core value from square footage to service experience.

JustCo flips this by adding front-desk hospitality akin to hotels, anticipating tenants’ needs and visitor flows as standard expectations. This nuance builds customer lock-in rarely seen in typical real estate, as it requires scale and operational sophistication. Compare this to generic providers focused only on leasing desks or offices.

Leverage Through Tiered Brands and Market Focus

JustCo launched two new brands—THE COLLECTIVE luxury coworking and the boring office minimalist solution—to target varied client needs with pricing bands roughly ±20-30% of its core offering. This product triptych creates layered market segmentation with automated service variance, reducing the need for bespoke sales efforts.

Markets like Japan appreciate high-touch luxury, prompting THE COLLECTIVE launches in Tokyo, Bangkok, and Taipei, while stripped-down options cater efficiently to cost-conscious regional offices in Singapore. This portfolio diversification spreads risk and operational loads.

Unlike competitors who chase scale via valuations or pricing arbitrage, JustCo's system creates compounding advantages by embedding service as a scalable infrastructure, akin to how OpenAI scales GPT through platform design rather than raw compute expansion.

Regional Expansion as Network and Experience Leverage

JustCo now operates 48 offices across the Asia-Pacific, including major hubs such as Seoul, Melbourne, and Sydney. Their recent entry into the Vietnam market—a region where flexible workspaces were scarce when Kong first worked in Ho Chi Minh City—is both strategic and nostalgic.

Expanding into markets like Malaysia, India, and soon the Middle East leverages network effects. Hosting multinational tenants such as Tencent and Moderna pushes economies of scale in operations and customer data, reducing acquisition costs and enhancing service feedback loops. This plays out as a regional “hospitality + workspace” platform—harder to replicate than standalone offices.

The model challenges the idea that coworking is purely a pandemic-driven fad. It’s a systemic repositioning of workspace lease into differentiated experience infrastructure with operational leverage.

What Asia’s Office Market Needs Next

The core constraint JustCo addresses is tenant retention and premium pricing in commoditized commercial real estate. By repurposing hospitality systems—cleaning schedules, breakfast services, pantry options—into automated operational tiers, the company shifts from competing on desks to delivering layered customer value.

This strategic repositioning opens pathways for other Asian coworking providers to scale beyond price wars, building operational moats rather than chasing occupancy rates. Markets in North Asia and the Middle East, which are next targets, stand to benefit from adopting hospitality-focused service automation in workspace design.

“Hospitality is leverage: it powers a network that compounds customer lifetime value without constant human intervention.” For coworking operators, that mindset signals the future of office leasing in Asia.

Explore how this hospitality-driven leverage model parallels insights from sales team leverage and the structuring of process documentation to unlock growth in complex systems.

Related Tools & Resources

As JustCo redefines coworking by embedding a hospitality approach into their services, using a platform like Ten Speed can further enhance marketing operations and workflow management for businesses operating in this competitive sector. By streamlining processes and ensuring efficient collaboration among teams, Ten Speed empowers businesses to focus more on customer experience and less on operational headaches. Learn more about Ten Speed →

Full Transparency: Some links in this article are affiliate partnerships. If you find value in the tools we recommend and decide to try them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools that align with the strategic thinking we share here. Think of it as supporting independent business analysis while discovering leverage in your own operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is JustCo's unique approach to coworking spaces?

JustCo treats coworking not just as office rental but as a hospitality business, embedding frontline service and customer care similar to hotels. This approach enhances client experiences and enables premium pricing.

How many offices does JustCo operate in the Asia-Pacific region?

JustCo operates 48 offices across major Asia-Pacific hubs including Seoul, Melbourne, Sydney, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Ho Chi Minh City, expanding its network and operational leverage.

What are the new brands launched by JustCo and their purposes?

JustCo launched two new brands: THE COLLECTIVE, a luxury coworking brand targeting high-touch markets like Tokyo, and the boring office, a minimalist solution aimed at cost-conscious clients in regions like Singapore, offering pricing bands ±20-30% around its core services.

How does JustCo's model differ from typical coworking providers?

Unlike standard desk-leasing offices competing mainly on price and location, JustCo incorporates hospitality service infrastructure that anticipates tenant and visitor needs, creating customer lock-in through operational scale and sophistication.

What markets is JustCo targeting for future expansion?

JustCo plans regional expansion into markets such as Malaysia, India, and the Middle East, leveraging network effects to enhance operational economies of scale and service feedback loops.

Why is JustCo's model considered strategic leverage rather than commodity office leasing?

By embedding hospitality services and automating operational tiers, JustCo shifts value from purely square footage to experience infrastructure, driving tenant retention and enabling premium pricing in a commoditized market.

How does JustCo's approach impact tenant retention and pricing?

JustCo's hospitality-driven model addresses tenant retention challenges by offering layered services like breakfast, cleaning, and pantry options, which increase customer lifetime value and support premium pricing.

What lessons from other industries does JustCo draw to scale its coworking platform?

JustCo's system parallels OpenAI’s platform design strategy for scaling ChatGPT to 1 billion users, focusing on embedding service as a scalable infrastructure rather than just increasing raw capacity.