According to Google Trends, global interest in office furniture has been in sharp decline since 2004 as displayed below. Regional interest in office furniture over the last decade has been strongest in South Africa, followed by Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States.
The top overall searches relating to office furniture since 2004 as seen in the snapshot below are ‘used furniture’ and ‘used office furniture’. The top search globally in 2015 was again ‘used office furniture’.
This is very interesting data considering the demand for second hand office furniture has been very volatile this decade. It was only a few years ago that the average price for used wholesale office furniture dropped to levels that pushed many second hand furniture dealers out of the market.
In Australia, ‘Melbourne office furniture’ has been the top related search over time, and the biggest rising search in the last 10 years has been ‘Adelaide office furniture’.
As you you can see from the above chart, the last 10 years have also seen a rapid decline in the demand for office workstations. We know that this data relates to office workstation furniture as opposed to personal computers because the highest related search term that composes the data is ‘office workstation furniture’. One possible explanation for the decline could be a move towards open plan offices and activity based work spaces. Further quantitative analysis is required to move beyond speculation.
