India’s Global Capability Centre (GCC) boom is reshaping the country’s commercial real estate market, and flexible workspace operators like WeWork India, Awfis and others have emerged as the biggest beneficiaries of this shift.
With multinational firms moving away from large, multi-year leases and sprawling single-campus facilities, and increasingly embracing asset-light, quick-to-scale “micro-hub” models, GCCs have become the centre of flexspace operators's growth story.
For many of these operators, GCCs are no longer just an important customer segment; they are becoming the dominant engine of growth. WeWork India and Awfis now derive an estimated 35–45 percent of their portfolios and revenues from GCC clients, driven by global firms’ preference for turnkey, fully managed workspaces that allow them to expand across Indian talent hubs with minimal friction.
Shrinivas Rao, CEO of Vestian, said GCCs are now the defining force in India’s office market. “GCCs continue to serve as a dominant catalyst for India’s office market, positioning the country as a global hub for innovation and high-value engineering, research and development, and enterprise functions.” He noted that, in the first nine months of 2025 alone, GCCs accounted for over 40 percent of office leasing, absorbing nearly 23.7 million sq ft.
Acquisition mode
This expansion is directly pulling flexspace operators into a rapid acquisition mode.
According to Rao, operators have “stepped up their office space acquisition by over 24 percent in the first nine months of 2025” to meet demand.
By 2027, India’s flex stock is projected to surpass 100 million sq ft, with GCCs expected to contribute nearly half of the new workspace requirements. The trend, he said, is now “sustained and structural,” powered by shorter lease tenures, plug-and-play infrastructure and the ability to scale at speed — advantages especially appealing to small and mid-sized GCCs entering India to “test the waters.”
The strongest demand comes from IT-ITES and BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance), which together make up over 70 percent of GCC occupants in flex centres. Analysts say the preference is not merely for convenience but for sharp cost leverage.
Vimal Nadar, National Director and Head of Research at Colliers India, said GCCs are choosing flexible and managed spaces because they deliver real-estate efficiency and “offer up to 20 perecent cost arbitrage in Central Business District (CBD) and Secondary Business District (SBD) locations.”
With workforce requirements often fluctuating across functions and geographies, flex allows global firms to manage headcount cycles without locking into rigid long-term commitments.
Flexspace operators ride the GCC wave
WeWork India CEO Karan Virwani told Moneycontrol that the flexspace segment growth has been both broad and accelerated.
“In the last 12 months, the industry has grown at roughly about 20 percent. We've grown at roughly about 21.3 percent. So today, we sit at about 7.7 million square foot with about 115,000 desks.”
WeWork India’s Q2 FY26 revenue from operations rose 22.4 percent year-on-year.
GCCs are a major contributor to this expansion.
“GCCs account for about 35 percent of our total portfolio today,” Virwani said, adding that the company is preparing to launch a tailored GCC product targeting different maturity stages — entry, scaling and long-term sophistication.
'Infrastructure biggest bottleneck'
The biggest bottleneck global firms face, he said, is infrastructure. “Finding the right office, actually investing upfront… our model is working really well because I can quickly come and set up pretty much overnight.”
WeWork has already built a network of enterprise partnerships in this space. “We have eight MoUs with these GCCs as service businesses… who are using us basically as their certified real estate partner,” Virwani said, underscoring how deeply embedded flex operators are becoming in global firms’ India strategies.
Awfis is witnessing a similar shift in its client base.
Chairman Amit Ramani said: “Today, I would say… probably 40–45 percent of our portfolio is what we would call GCC clients.” Mid-tier global companies, especially those entering India for the first time, are scaling faster than ever, prompting Awfis to sharpen its premium product focus.
“We launched Office Gold and Elite… today 26 centres are what we would call premium centres,” Ramani said. He added that “Nine GCCs sit out of our five elite centres,” and that 11 of the 50 new GCC entrants in recent months have chosen Awfis — a reflection of both brand recognition and end-to-end service capability.
For GCCs, Awfis is positioning itself as a one-stop solutions provider. “Everything that the GCC requires, from an infrastructure perspective, is available under one umbrella with us,” Ramani said. This spans IT, transport, design and build, cafeteria operations and other allied services that global clients want consolidated under a single managed platform.
Awfis’ financial performance reflects this surge, with Awfis Q2 FY26 operating revenue rising 26 percent year-on-year.
With both large multinationals and fast-scaling mid-sized firms driving demand, industry experts say that flexspaces are no longer a secondary or interim choice, and, in fact, they are becoming the default workplace architecture for India’s GCC ecosystem.
“As hub-and-spoke work models and proximity to talent hubs become focal consideration points, GCCs are progressively adopting flex spaces into their real estate strategies and workplace planning,” said Colliers’ Nadar.
He expects GCCs to be the biggest catalysts for expansion, with flex operators potentially accounting for one-fifth of Grade A office absorption over the next two to three years.
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