In a recent CREA United meeting, someone noted that fewer companies are chasing a single 50,000-100,000-square-foot block downtown, opting instead for smaller pieces scattered across a metro. They aren’t imagining things. Commercial real estate professionals are calling that shift “hub and spoke,” and it’s worth a conversation because it breaks from the now-tired trope that remote work broke the office.
The idea, briefly
Hub-and-spoke isn’t a new concept. It’s borrowed from logistics, where airlines and shipping networks route everything through a central point for efficiency. Applied to office space, the “hub” is the company’s flagship location — often in a major market and kept for leadership visibility, culture-building events, and cross-team collaboration that thrives when everyone’s in the same room. The “spokes” are smaller satellite offices located closer to clusters of employees. These offices are sized for local team syncs and focused work rather than company-wide gatherings.
Workplace strategists have been floating this idea since 2018, but it remained a fringe concept until the pandemic scattered workforces across suburbs and secondary cities, making a single central office a much worse fit for where people actually were. UK data backs up how mainstream this thinking has become. Nearly 50% of UK businesses are currently considering some version of this model for their own footprint.
The economics driving the hub-and-spoke trend
Examine the numbers and you’ll see that the financial logic is pretty straightforward. Global Workplace Analytics has estimated that a typical employer saves about $11,000 per year for each employee working remotely half of the time, thanks to reduced real estate, lower absenteeism, and productivity gains.
Granted, that’s a pre-pandemic figure that’s been widely recirculated since, but the underlying logic — that a smaller central footprint plus flexible local space beats one oversized lease — has only become more attractive as construction and lease costs have climbed.
Real-world examples back it up. T-Mobile cut its real estate costs by about 80% after it partnered with a flex-workspace provider to replace three regional offices with access to thousands of on-demand locations nationwide.
Tech and telecom aren’t the only industries making this move. A Bay Area professional services firm restructured around flex space across three strategic locations in lieu of relocating its headquarters. The flagship has kept its downtown presence for major meetings, but day-to-day work happens wherever it’s most convenient for each team.
Hub and spoke isn’t a one-way trend
Here’s the interesting part of the story. Hub and spoke isn’t unfolding as cleanly as its early advocates predicted in 2020 and 2021. One industry analysis found that, in practice, many companies are directing more investment back into their central hub offices rather than expanding satellite spokes. These companies have opted to upgrade their hub spaces specifically for the collaboration and meeting-heavy work that’s hardest to replicate remotely.
Employees, meanwhile, still seem content working from home or dropping into a flex space on their own terms, leaving some companies wondering about the value of committing financially to a dedicated spoke office.
Another CRE firm noted that most companies haven’t pulled the trigger on a full hub and spoke strategy, preferring to wait until their workforce patterns settle before committing real estate dollars to a structure that may not make sense in a few years. In hindsight, that caution was quite prescient. The model works best when a company has geographic clusters of employees worth serving locally; for a workforce that’s widely scattered and low in concentration in any one area, the juice is likely not worth the squeeze.
Where the hub and spoke model has seen success
Hub and spoke is sticking in a few places, with recurring patterns. First, spokes need legitimate amenities (e.g., not a folding table in a strip mall). Industry observers have noted no matter how convenient it looks on paper, a satellite office in a location lacking convenient lunch options or transit access is more likely to fail. Spokes cut off from advancement opportunities at HQ can devolve into dead-end postings that hurt rather than help retention.
Second, flex space, rather than a fully leased satellite office, has become the default way companies test the model before committing fully. Short-term flex leases let a company activate a spoke in a growing cluster of employees and walk away just as easily if the projected use doesn’t materialize. Given how much uncertainty still surrounds long-term office demand, it’s a reasonable precaution.
The pattern is even more pronounced in international high-growth markets. India’s flexible office inventory passed 100 million square feet in 2026. Driven substantially by global companies building this hub-and-spoke structure for their offshore operations centers, it has grown at a 23-25% compound annual rate over the past five years .
Hub and spoke for the leasing side
For anyone leasing or advising on office space right now, the takeaway isn’t that the single headquarters model is dead — demand is bifurcating. Landlords with large blocks in gateway markets should expect continued interest from companies investing in their hub, especially for spaces that support collaboration and event-style gatherings.
Meanwhile, smaller, flexible spaces in secondary and suburban markets — especially those near where a company’s current workforce lives — are attracting occupiers interested in opening a spoke without the long-term commitment of a traditional lease.
The companies most likely to act on this trend? Those with geographic clusters worth serving rather than scattered remote employees. If you’re advising a client with 15 or more people living in a metro outside their company headquarters, consider it a threshold where a conversation about a spoke — leased or flexible — starts to make financial sense.
Are you a commercial real estate investor or seeking a specific property to meet your company’s needs? We invite you to talk to the professionals at CREA United, an organization of CRE professionals from over 65 firms representing all disciplines within the CRE industry, from brokers to subcontractors, financial services to security systems, interior designers to architects, movers to IT, and more.
