Gastro founder Katrin Wesche-Kolo was looking for a place for her Café Charlie & Lars. The real estate company BHB had a shop on Dachauer Strasse, which is used as a showroom for discussions and presentations. But all too often the area remained unused, the company wanted to revitalize it. Both sides came together via the Shquared platform. Now Wesche-Kolo is busy building and counting the days until the opening on May 9th and is happy: “This area would never have opened up for us without Shquared.”
The online platform has been around for four years and aims to bring companies together for multiple uses. A mixture of Airbnb and Tinder for commercial space, that’s how Jeanette de Pauli from Shquared describes it. She estimates that around 20 to 25 such partnerships have been found so far. There were also larger projects such as the Baaal initiative in Berg am Laim with 20 different concepts for one area.
One of the classic shared uses is a publishing house in the Stemmerhof in Sendling, which shares its premises with an event organizer. Or the Munich Käsemanufaktur, which organized tastings in the Café Gartensalon in Maxvorstadt. Wesche-Kolo also ran her café there for a while. She has benefited from the regular customers of the garden salon, she says – because they were happy that lunch was offered there again.
The potential for shared uses is great in Munich, commercial space is scarce. And you just have to walk through the streets and see how many shops are dark, says de Pauli. A study has shown that commercial space remains unused for up to 60 percent of its possible useful life. Why is the potential so often not used? On the one hand, there are various hurdles in getting permits from the authorities, explain de Pauli and Wesche-Kolo, who can report on this from their own experience. On the other hand, land owners are often anxious, even if they think the idea is basically a good one.
Shquared wants to take off across Germany with the idea
A year ago, the green-red town hall coalition asked the administration to help leverage this potential. In March, the city council decided that a guide should be created on the subject. It should be available in a year, make the concept better known and facilitate practical implementation.
On the one hand, shared uses are a benefit for the environment because of the more efficient use of space, says Green City Councilor Julia Post, who is pushing the issue. On the other hand, this promotes the founding of companies because it reduces costs and investment requirements. New companies also benefit because they get more visibility right from the start.
This could also happen to Katrin Wesche-Kolo when she opens her Café Charlie & Lars on Dachauer Straße. And Squared? The team now has six people. They want to broker an area in Frankfurt am Main in the near future. They want to take off across Germany with their idea.