After murmurings of issues occurring at serviced office provider Knotel, CEO Amol Sarva provided a rare insight into the company’s financial figures.
This comes after news that one-third of the company’s New York City portfolio is vacant and reports of it laying off 24 staffers from its Manhattan office.
“We operate a flexible office platform, by definition we run spaces that will be available for us to sell every year,” said Sarva. “The point of the business is not to lock up our portfolio in very long leases. Our customers don’t want to move, but they want to know they can make changes and that absolutely requires us to keep our portfolio liquid.”
Sarva revealed that Knotel began 2020 with $350 million of annual revenue, up from $100 million at the start of 2019, and expects the firm to break-even by the end of the year.
The only other look into Knotel’s financials came in 2018 when The Real Deal gathered internal numbers that revealed the company’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization loss of $24.1 million on $17.6 million in revenues.
In the second half of 2019, Sarva said Knotel added 1.1 million square feet to its portfolio, which is near the total amount of space the company leased in 2018.
Despite the scrutiny it has faced over the past few months, Sarva said Knotel is still focusing on New York and believes that the flexible office industry as a whole will continue to grow.
