I asked a panel about weaponising community.

Not building community. Not nurturing community. Not creating meaningful connection.

Weaponising it.

Using community to hold higher rates. Using it to reduce churn. Using it to make the commercial strategy sharper, harder, more defensible.

A few people hated the phrase.

Good.

They should hate it a little. It is an ugly phrase because it drags the quiet part into the light. It says the thing coworking usually dresses up in softer language.

That is where people get uncomfortable.

Not because they do not believe community has value. Everyone in this industry says community has value. They say it in pitch decks, on tours, in award submissions, in LinkedIn posts, and in those painful little “more than just a desk” captions underneath photos of people eating pastries.

The discomfort starts when you ask what that value is worth.

Does it protect rate?

Does it reduce churn?

Does it make someone choose your building over the cheaper one down the road?

Does it make members bring other people in?

Does it turn occupancy into loyalty?

If the answer is no, then it is not strategy. It is decoration.

And coworking has become dangerously good at decoration.

The breakfast spread.

The tote bag.

The networking drinks.

The panel with a vague title and three people talking about purpose.

Some of it works. Some of it matters. But none of it means anything if it does not change the way people feel about the building.

The commercial point

Community becomes powerful when it creates a cost to exit that is not written into the licence agreement.

Not a penalty. Not a trap. Not a cynical retention hack.

A genuine emotional and practical cost.

“I know people here.”

“My team has a rhythm here.”

“We meet clients here.”

“I get introduced to people here.”

“This place makes us look good.”

“We would lose something if we moved.”

That is community doing its job.

What hospitality already knows

Hotels understand this. The Hoxton is not just selling a bed. It sells the lobby, the neighbourhood, the noise, the bar, the people working from sofas, the sense that you are not trapped in some dead corporate box above a breakfast buffet. The room matters, obviously. But the room is not the whole transaction. The atmosphere is doing part of the selling.

Soho House understands it even more brutally. You are not just paying for somewhere to sit down. You are paying for access, taste, familiarity, recognition, and the small ego hit of belonging to something with a door policy.

You can hate that. You can call it pretentious. But commercially, it works because the product is not square footage. The product is belonging with a bar tab.

Airbnb did not build itself on “we have spare rooms.” It sold the idea of living somewhere, not visiting it. The commercial machine was accommodation, but the emotional sale was localness, intimacy, and the feeling that you had slipped through the side door of a city rather than queued at the front desk.

Restaurants know this instinctively. The good ones are not just selling food. They are selling recognition. Ritual. Taste. Pace. Memory. The table you like. The person who remembers your drink. The sense that the room works and that you understand how to be in it.

That is why people go back. Not because the chair is technically comfortable. Because something about the place has attached itself to them.

What coworking needs to get braver about

Community is not always warm and fuzzy. Sometimes it is standards. Sometimes it is status. Sometimes it is convenience. Sometimes it is taste. Sometimes it is shared routine. Sometimes it is the quiet confidence that the right people are in the room.

So yes, I like the phrase weaponising community.

Not because members are the target. They are not.

The target is churn.

The target is discounting.

The target is the lazy race to same desk, cheaper price.

The target is the broker spreadsheet where every product gets reduced to location, desk count, meeting rooms, and monthly rate.

That is what community should be weaponised against.

If your community is real, it should make your product harder to compare. It should make the cheaper option feel thinner. It should give your sales team something better than “we have great breakout space.” It should give your renewal conversation more weight than “costs have increased.” It should give members a reason to stay that is not just admin, habit, or contract dates.

If you are building community because it sounds nice, say that. But if you are running a flexible workspace business, be honest. You are building community because the strongest products are the hardest ones to leave.

That means the community team is not just doing vibes. They are protecting revenue. They are building memory into the building. They are creating reasons to return. They are making introductions that turn strangers into members and members into advocates. They are spotting drift before the cancellation lands. They are giving the sales team proof that the product is alive. They are making the building feel like more than rented furniture and a coffee machine.

That is not fluffy. That is commercial infrastructure.

And the operators who understand that will win. Not because they exploit community. Because they take it seriously enough to design it properly, measure it honestly, and admit what it is really for.

Weaponising community sounds dirty. Maybe that is why it works. Because it forces the industry to stop pretending that the most valuable part of the product should somehow be commercially invisible.

Flex operates with one of the most fragmented technology stacks in commercial real estate.

A typical operator runs at least a CRM, a property management system, an access control layer, a billing tool, a community platform, sensors and comms, and each of those tools has its own opinion about what a “member” or a “renewal” or an “occupied seat” actually is.

Most of the time you can work around it.

You sit in a meeting, look at two different occupancy numbers, agree which one to trust for the next twenty minutes, and move on. It’s annoying, it costs time, but it works, because a human in the room is doing the reconciling silently. Judgement is patching the foundation in real time.

The reason that’s about to stop being good enough has nothing to do with AI being smart or dumb.

And right now, every one of those is being held together by a person in a meeting who knows which version of “occupancy” actually fits the question being asked.

When an AI agent reads the same stack, it doesn’t do that.

It isn’t that an agent can’t reason.
Agents apply probabilistic reasoning constantly, that’s the whole point.
What they can’t do is interrogate the structure they’ve been handed.
They take the definitions and the data as given, and they act on them confidently.

So the silent reconciliation that used to happen in the meeting just…doesn’t. A bad assumption stops being a one off slip and becomes a pattern, the same confidently wrong answer repeated across every report, every forecast, every customer touchpoint, faster than anyone can audit it.

That’s what changes the stakes.
Not that AI introduces a new problem, but that it compounds an old one at scale, with full confidence, and no obvious failure mode.

The meeting where you notice it

Every flex team I’ve worked with has had the same meeting.
Three people in a room, four definitions of occupancy, and a spreadsheet that was fine until someone asked the question.

Is it contracted desks over total?
Physical presence over capacity?
Revenue weighted?
Does a hot desk count?

Everyone in the room is technically right. The reports aren’t wrong. It isn’t a messy team failing to agree, it’s four very sensible definitions colliding.

Some of that disagreement is worth keeping.
If you run mostly private offices you’ll almost certainly measure occupancy differently to someone running mostly hot desks, because you’re running very different businesses. The mistake isn’t the definition varying between companies. It’s letting it vary inside one.

And inside one report that’s going to the asset owner.

Two shapes of the problem

All of this tends to land in two recognisable shapes.

One is when a single word is actually doing two jobs.
One operator I’ve been working with had been using “occupancy” as a single metric. The contracted side, what percentage of their offices had a paying customer’s name against them, turned out to be a different number from the actual use side, what percentage of the desks in the building were under contract. They’d been leaning on one of those and treating it as the whole picture. The number wasn’t wrong. It was a siloed view of what their occupancy actually looked like.

Once they ran both signals side by side, named them as different things, and understood what each really meant, the planning conversation finally had both halves of the picture.

Their approach to driving top of funnel totally changed, they then realised they had more budget to play with than they thought.

And the landlord report they’d been producing started telling a story that actually held together under questioning.

The other shape lives between systems rather than inside heads.
Another operator we work with had a member whose contract was terminated and reissued under a new arrangement. The original contract was being held as inactive in one system and as still live in another. The renewal was being counted in one place and missed completely in another.

The fix here wasn’t an SQL query.
It was the documented agreement about what an “active contract” actually meant in that business, and what counted as a rolling renewal versus a fresh signing. Once that was agreed and communicated, the systems could be aligned to it. Without that, no amount of integration work would have made the numbers make sense, and the MRR figure being reported up to the asset owner was off by enough to make a difference.

All of this is genuinely unglamorous.

But without agreed definitions, every decision built on top of them is at risk. The planning session running on a metric that means different things to different people in the room. The landlord report that doesn’t actually add up, and maybe isn’t questioned until it’s audited, or worse, until the asset owner runs their own analysis and notices. The public inventory feed you push to Valve showing listings that don’t match what’s actually true on the floor.

The internal version costs time.

The external one costs trust, credibility, the margin you’re meant to be protecting, and ultimately the asset value you’re meant to be creating. Which is probably tight enough already.

What it takes to fix, and when not to

We spent the best part of eighteen months on this at Koho.
Not handing operators a universal definition they need to adopt, but getting each operator’s stack to a single agreed set. Occupancy, utilisation, MRR that matches how they actually bill, and how the finance team needs to recognise it, churn that can tell a non renewal apart from a mid term exit.

That outcome’s only possible when you totally understand how an operation functions day to day. Walking through every metric that lands on every report, finding where it’s defined, finding where two systems disagree about it, deciding which is correct for that particular business, because the answer is hardly ever universal, then actually writing it down and treating it as gospel.

It’s worth being honest about when addressing all of this gets easier and when it gets harder.

Early is easier.
A two building operator with eighteen months of trading data has a much cheaper version of this conversation than a multisite operator with eight years of accumulated reporting and a dozen integrations to align. The definitions you set early embed in the team’s vocabulary, the training, the operational habits.

Wait, and now you’re untangling legacy noise alongside the actual decisions, paying for it twice. Once in the unpicking, once in every report that ran on the wrong number in the meantime.

For most multisite operators, the cost has already been quietly piling up.
The landlord report is already arguing with itself, the AI tools are being demoed and deployed, and the data underneath all of it is still disagreeing.

Most operators are implementing the features before they fix the foundations underneath.

The agent gets bought, the demo works, and the failure starts quietly afterwards. An AI reasoning over inconsistent definitions doesn’t fail loudly, it delivers a confident answer that happens to be wrong, and the wrongness compounds across every report and forecast it touches before anyone goes looking for it. And the first person who goes looking is usually sitting outside your operation, the prospect on a demo call, the auditor running their own numbers, the asset owner reading the report you handed up last quarter.

Tons of the conversations I’m in are spent on the tool at the top, the end result, the tangible piece the customer sees and acts on.
Because it’s fun, it’s exciting.

Hardly anyone gets excited about standardising CRM or PMS datasets.

The version of AI flex operators are being sold, the one that takes a workflow end to end, not just drafts the email before it’s sent, needs reconciled definitions underneath it.

Or it will make mistakes.

And those mistakes will land in the report you hand up the chain.

The unglamorous question of what your metrics actually mean was always going to decide what your building is worth.

AI didn’t change that.

It just guaranteed the asset owner gets to the answer before you do.

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

AI Is Reshaping Office Search

In this episode of Brave Ideas, is joined by , CEO of Space to Places, and co-host , CEO of Flexspace AI, to explore how AI is beginning to influence office search, and why better data, greater transparency, and clearer market information will become more important as companies use new tools to discover and compare office options.

Zoe explains why the flex office market is still difficult for customers to navigate. With coworking, serviced offices, managed offices, enterprise suites, landlord-led flex, and hybrid models all competing for attention, the terminology is often confusing and the data is inconsistent.

That becomes even more important as companies begin using LLMs and AI tools to search for office space.

If customers are asking:

“Where is the best office for my team?”

or

“Which workplace fits our culture, budget, and location?”,

then, the industry needs cleaner, more trusted, and more structured data.

Zoe shares her vision for Office Tier List, an independent information layer designed to help end users compare workplace options with greater confidence, based on verified information rather than marketing claims or opaque incentives.

The conversation also covers brand differentiation, managed office growth, service quality, workplace culture, and why the next phase of flex will depend on better information as much as better product.

FREE UK Flexible Office Market Reports

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How companies are beginning to use AI tools to search for office space

• Why the flex office market is still difficult for customers to understand

• How LLMs and AI assistants are beginning to reshape workplace discovery

• Why clean, structured, trusted data will become more important in flex

• Why brand differentiation needs to be backed by substance, not just design

• How managed office is blurring the lines between traditional office and flex

• Why customers need better terminology, clearer comparisons, and better market education

• How operators can improve discoverability in an AI-enabled search environment

• Why better data can help landlords understand the operator landscape and different flex models available to them

Key Takeaways for Operators

• AI discovery will reward operators with better data.
  As customers begin using AI tools to search for office space, operators will need accurate, structured, trustworthy information about their locations, amenities, services, availability, customer fit, and product positioning. Generic marketing language will become less useful if it cannot be understood, verified, and compared.

• Brand needs to be clear, not just attractive.
  Zoe makes the point that brand is not just about style, logos, or interiors. Operators need to clearly communicate who they serve, what they offer, how their service differs, and why a customer should choose them over another option.

• The customer is still confused.
  The industry uses too many overlapping terms, including coworking, serviced office, managed office, flex, enterprise suites, landlord-led flex, and traditional office with service layers. Operators that simplify the decision-making process will have an advantage.

• Verified information will become more valuable than marketing claims.
  Zoe argues that the sector needs more factual, independent, high-quality data. That includes real location information, actual amenities, verified services, accurate imagery, and clearer comparisons across the market.

• Managed office is raising the bar for differentiation.
  As more operators and landlords offer managed solutions, the winners will not just be those with fitted space. They will be the ones that can demonstrate service quality, responsiveness, cultural fit, and clear value for the customer.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• AI is beginning to change how demand discovers supply.
  If companies increasingly begin their office search through AI tools, landlords will need to think differently about how their buildings, flex products, and operator partners are represented in structured data environments.

• Flex strategy cannot be based on guesswork.
  Zoe explains that landlords are using different models, including leases, management agreements, hybrid structures, franchises, and in-house platforms. The right model depends on the building, location, hold period, target customer, and asset strategy.

• Data will become a leasing and asset management advantage.
  The landlords and operators with clearer information about product, service, amenities, customer fit, and performance will be better positioned as the market becomes more transparent and AI-enabled.

• Managed office is not just fitted space.
  Landlords moving into managed office need to understand the service layer, the customer experience, the operational requirements, and the brand expectations that come with the product. Furniture and flexible terms alone will not create a defensible offer.

• Better transparency should improve market understanding.
  As more independent data becomes available, landlords should be able to better understand the operator landscape, the range of flex models available, and the different ways flexible office can be delivered within an asset.

Behind The Scenes

We want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where this episode was recorded, for their brilliant podcast studio and hospitality throughout the season. Tap here to book their podcast studio yourself!

The next day the trio joined the Flex Tribes event, where Zoe & Eyal were in the Yield Management discussion.

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

The Frontline Knows Before the Dashboard

In this episode of Brave Ideas, Caleb Parker is joined by Sophie Turnbull, Chief Revenue Officer at Orega, along with Cohost, , CEO of Flexspace AI.

Sophie has been in the flexible office industry for nearly two decades, and you can hear it in the way she talks about the business.

She started at The Instant Group back in 2008, when this industry was still a much smaller world, and has since worked across several different operator brands, including Work.Life, Huckletree, and now Orega.

That gives her a pretty unique perspective.

She has seen the broker side, the operator side, the community-led brands, the design-led brands, and the more traditional serviced office side. So when Sophie talks about what actually makes a flex business work, it is not theory. It is based on years of being close to the customer, close to the sales team, and close to the operational detail.

And that is where this conversation gets really interesting.

Because if operators are serious about reducing churn, improving retention, and making better commercial decisions, they need to find better ways to capture that insight and bring it into the business.

We also talk about customer fit, pipeline discipline, broker relationships, sales training, product knowledge, and why operators need to stop treating customers as just a number in an office.

This episode is a practical look at how frontline insight, commercial discipline, and better account management can help operators build stronger, more resilient flexible workspace businesses.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why frontline teams may hold some of the most valuable customer data in a flex operation

• How informal conversations in kitchens, corridors, lifts, and reception areas can reveal renewal risk

• Why operators need better systems for capturing customer intelligence before it disappears

• How frontline feedback can support account management, retention, and churn prevention

• Why renewal conversations should happen throughout the customer lifecycle, not just at renewal stage

• How customer fit affects retention, pricing power, and long term revenue quality

• Why operators need to understand when a customer is worth retaining, and when churn may be the right outcome

• How sales teams can improve conversion by knowing the product, brand, inventory, facilities, and competition in detail

• Why pipeline discipline matters when making pricing, renewal, and churn decisions

• How brokers can add value when they understand the operator’s product and customer profile

• Why direct leads and broker led leads require different commercial thinking

• How operators can turn customer insight into better pricing, better service, and stronger retention

• Why investing in people remains one of the most practical ways to improve operator performance

Key Takeaways for Operators

• Your frontline team may know about churn before your reports do.
  Sophie makes the point that front of house and centre teams often hear what leadership does not. They hear complaints, frustrations, positive feedback, expansion signals, and small comments that reveal whether a customer is happy, disengaged, or at risk.

• The problem is not just collecting data, it is capturing what people already know.
  Many operators already have valuable customer intelligence inside the business, but it sits in people’s heads, informal conversations, spreadsheets, decks, and scattered notes. The challenge is turning that into something the business can actually use.

• Retention starts before the renewal conversation.
  Sophie is clear that customers often remember the most recent part of the relationship when renewal time comes. That means operators need to listen, communicate, and act throughout the customer lifecycle, not only when a contract is about to expire.

• Churn prevention depends on account management, not last minute discounting.
  If a customer is unhappy, operators need to understand why early enough to solve it. Sometimes the answer is better communication, sometimes it is a service fix, sometimes it is a product adjustment, and sometimes it is a more suitable office configuration.

• Customers should not be treated as numbers in offices.
  Sophie warns against looking at yield management purely through the lens of office size and revenue. Operators need to understand the business behind the customer, how they use the space, what value they bring, and whether there is a better solution that works for both sides.

• The best sales teams know the product in detail.
  Sales teams need to know more than pricing and availability. They need to understand the brand, the building, the inventory, IT, amenities, facilities, and what can physically be changed inside the space. That level of preparation makes customer and broker conversations more effective.

• Training is not a soft cost, it is a commercial lever.
  Sophie argues that operators often fail to educate their teams properly when launching new products, processes, or ways of working. Better training creates more confident teams, better customer conversations, and stronger conversion.

• Pipeline discipline gives operators confidence.
  Understanding lead flow, tour conversion, warm prospects, blockers, and decision timelines helps operators make better decisions on pricing and retention. Without that visibility, operators risk making renewal decisions in the dark.

• Broker relationships need clarity and mutual value.
  Sophie sees real value in the broker channel, but only when brokers understand the product, are given the right information, and help customers make better decisions. Operators also need to be clear on fees, expectations, and the true cost of acquisition.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• Frontline intelligence should be part of asset management.
  Landlords and investors should not only ask for occupancy, revenue, and pipeline reports. They should also ask how operators capture customer sentiment, service issues, renewal risk, expansion demand, and informal feedback from the teams closest to customers.

• Churn risk is often visible before it becomes financial.
  A customer rarely leaves without signals. Complaints, reduced engagement, changed utilisation, pricing concerns, service frustrations, and expansion or contraction needs can often be spotted early if the operator has the right feedback loops.

• Operator quality shows up in the account management system.
  A strong operator does not wait for renewal dates. They manage relationships continuously, understand each customer’s business, track risk, and use customer intelligence to make better commercial decisions.

• People are part of the operating platform.
  In flexible workspace, the team is not separate from the product. The frontline team shapes the customer experience, the sales team shapes conversion, and the account management team shapes retention. Weak teams can undermine strong real estate.

• Data strategy should include human data.
  Dashboards matter, but they do not capture everything. Some of the most valuable insights come from conversations, service moments, and day to day interactions. The opportunity is to combine operational data with human intelligence.

• Sales enablement affects asset performance.
  If the sales team does not understand the product, inventory, customer profile, and competitive context, the asset will leak revenue. Better training can improve conversion, protect rate, and reduce avoidable friction in the sales process.

• Brand clarity improves customer fit.
  Sophie is clear that operators need to know who their product is for. That matters for landlords and investors because better customer fit can improve retention, reduce churn risk, and support stronger pricing discipline.

• Churn is not always bad, but unmanaged churn is.
  There are cases where a customer may not be the right fit, or where the economics no longer work. The key is making that decision deliberately, with visibility on replacement demand, acquisition cost, void risk, and long term value.

Behind The Scenes

We want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where this episode was recorded, for their brilliant podcast studio and hospitality throughout the season. Tap here to book their podcast studio yourself!

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

From Rent Roll to Retention

For decades, office real estate was built around a simple idea, sign the lease, collect the rent, manage the building.

But that model has been under pressure in recent years.

Customers want more flexibility.
SMEs need room to grow and contract.
Teams want better service.
Landlords need more resilient income.
And in a market where occupiers have more choice, the operators who understand people may be better positioned than landlords who only understand space.

In this episode of Brave Ideas, is joined by Rebekah Lloyd-Beere, Head of Flex at MediaCity, where she leads a 100,000 SqFt flex operation in Manchester, England.

Rebekah’s career did not start in traditional property.
She came from hospitality, joined MediaCity as a receptionist ten years ago, and built her career by identifying what customers needed before the organisation had roles designed to serve them.

Today, she oversees the P&L, customer experience, and growth of MediaCity’s flex business.

Joining as co-host is , CEO of Flexspace AI.

Rebekah explains why flex is not just about shorter contracts or higher desk rates. It is about retention, trust, customer lifetime value, and knowing when the best commercial decision is not to squeeze the highest rent today, but to keep the right customer for the long term.

We get into the practical decisions behind that mindset, from helping a customer downsize rather than lose them, to using virtual offices, meeting rooms, podcast studios, and day bookings as entry points into long-term membership.

Rebekah also explains why small hospitality details, remembering names, understanding businesses, checking in when people are struggling, can directly influence retention.

For office landlords and investors, the message is clear, the next phase of office value will not be created by rent roll alone. It will be created by operating models that keep customers, grow relationships, and protect income through flexibility.

Listen to the full episode to hear how MediaCity is turning flex into a customer retention strategy.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why Rebekah believes office real estate is ultimately a people business.

• How MediaCity built a 100,000 SqFt flex operation around customer experience, retention, and SME growth.

• Why the highest rent today is not always the best long-term commercial decision.

• How helping a customer downsize can become a retention strategy rather than a loss.

• Why virtual offices and day bookings can become gateways into long-term membership.

• How meeting rooms, podcast studios, and content facilities create both ancillary revenue and future demand.

• Why hospitality skills may be more valuable to flex operators than traditional property experience.

• How customer trust can protect income, reduce churn, and support long-term asset performance.

• Why landlords need to think about customer lifetime value, not just rent per SqFt.

• How small operational details can have a direct impact on retention and revenue quality.

Key Takeaways for Operators

• Retention is not a renewal tactic, it is an operating philosophy.
  Rebekah’s approach is simple, know the customer before there is a problem. If a business is struggling, the answer is not always to enforce the contract. Sometimes the better decision is to help them resize, protect the relationship, and keep them in the ecosystem.

• Flex cannot just mean premium pricing.
  Rebekah makes a clear point, flex is supposed to be flexible. If the model only works when customers keep paying for space they no longer need, it is not really flexible. It is just a shorter lease with better branding.

• The best operators understand the difference between price and value.
  Rebekah is willing to accept a lower initial rate for the right customer when she sees growth potential, retention upside, and strategic value to the wider estate. That does not mean ignoring the P&L, it means managing for longer-term income quality.

• Ancillary revenue should also be a customer acquisition channel.
  Meeting rooms, podcast studios, content spaces, virtual offices, and day offices are not just bolt-on revenue lines. They introduce people to the building, the brand, the team, and the experience.

• Hospitality is not softness, it is commercial discipline.
  Remembering names, understanding business needs, checking in when someone is struggling, and treating every customer as important are not cosmetic gestures. They create trust, and trust is what keeps customers from leaving.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• Stop underwriting flex like it is just a rent premium.
  The real upside is not only higher £ per SqFt. It is customer diversification, retention, ancillary income, SME growth, and the ability to capture demand that traditional leasing would miss.

• A building without an operating strategy is exposed.
  If landlords rely only on agents, leases, and fit-out to drive value, they risk missing the customer relationship layer. MediaCity’s example shows how value can be created through active management, not just asset ownership.

• Revenue quality is more nuanced than headline desk rate.
  A lower-paying customer who stays, grows, uses meeting rooms, upgrades over time, and contributes to the ecosystem may be more valuable than a higher-paying customer with weak loyalty.

• The strongest flex operators may reduce leasing risk across the wider asset.
  A well-run flex platform can act as a demand funnel, bringing in SMEs, startups, creators, and project-based teams that may eventually grow into larger office requirements.

• Customer lifetime value should be part of the landlord’s underwriting model.
  Traditional office underwriting still leans heavily on lease length, covenant, ERV, incentives, voids, and capex. In an operating model, landlords also need to understand conversion, churn, retention, upsell, downgrade risk, meeting room usage, and ancillary spend.

• The future office landlord needs operational empathy.
  That does not mean being charitable. It means understanding that members’ businesses fluctuate. Operators who can flex with those businesses may retain income that a rigid landlord would lose.

Behind The Scenes

We want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where this episode was recorded, for their brilliant podcast studio and hospitality throughout the season. Tap here to book their podcast studio yourself!

Rebekah also recently co-hosted our Brave Ideas x Flexspace AI event on Hacking the New Office Product for Hybrid Companies

Tap here to see Rebekah’s appearance on Brave Ideas Friday Five

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

SEE FULL PHOTO GALLERY

On Tuesday, 19 May, Brave Ideas and Flexspace AI brought together coworking & flex office operators for an intimate round table at at MediaCity in Manchester, UK to discuss one of the biggest questions facing commercial real estate today.

What does the office product need to become in a hybrid world?

The session was co-hosted by Rebekah Lloyd-Beere and James Panepinto.

The room included brands from across the flex and coworking ecosystem, including leaders from:

• Koba

• Wizu

• Halkin

• Clockwise

• MediaCity

• Capital & Centric’s Civic

• Colony

• Iconic Offices

• Consensus

• Department

• Brave

• Level

What made the conversation interesting was not just the agreement around hybrid work changing demand patterns. Most people in the room already accept that reality.

The deeper discussion focused on something more important:

Most office products, leasing structures, and sales processes are still built around pre-hybrid behaviour.

That mismatch is creating problems across the industry.

The Core Challenges Discussed

1. Getting People Into The Building

One of the strongest themes was footfall.

The challenge is no longer simply hitting occupancy targets.
It is creating enough value, energy, and relevance for people to choose to come in consistently.

Hybrid work has fundamentally changed occupancy rhythms.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are overloaded;
Mondays and Fridays often feel empty.
That uneven usage pattern creates both operational and experiential problems.

Buildings can feel under-energised even when occupancy appears healthy on paper.

And when energy drops, perceived value often drops with it.

2. Companies Want Flexibility, But The Product Often Hasn’t Evolved

Another key topic was how companies increasingly want less permanent space and more optionality.

Many companies no longer need traditional five-day-a-week offices, yet our industry still largely sells fixed products designed around full-time usage.

This has created growing interest in ideas such as:

• Fractional offices

• Shared team suites

• Flexible HQ models

• Membership-based workplace access

• Dynamic workplace subscriptions

The consensus in the room was that hybrid work is not necessarily shrinking office demand. It is reshaping how companies actually want to buy.

3. Underutilised Space Represents A Revenue Opportunity

A major conversation centered around monetising underused space and amenities, and quieter days.

Instead of viewing slow days and vacancy as dead space, operators discussed how buildings could generate additional revenue through:

• Day passes

• Event programming

• Wellness access

• Meeting rooms

• Hospitality offerings

• Non-member amenity access

Several people discussed the idea that future coworking locations may operate more like hotels, where multiple overlapping revenue streams support the core product.

This is particularly important for hybrid environments where utilisation fluctuates throughout the week.

4. The Coworking Industry Still Struggles To Explain Its Value Clearly

Another honest discussion focused on positioning.

Many coworking and flex brands still describe themselves using nearly identical language:

Community. Flexibility. Hospitality. Amenities. Collaboration.

The topics are not unimportant.
But the issue is that they are no longer enough on their own to create differentiation.

The room discussed how the strongest brands increasingly stand for something more specific.

From Generic Buildings To Location-Based Brands

One of the most compelling ideas discussed was the emergence of location-based brands.

Instead of buildings competing purely on fit-out or location, some operators are creating environments associated with specific industries, communities, or identities.

The idea is that a building becomes known for a particular ecosystem through:

• Its member mix

• Programming

• Events

• Partnerships

• Marketing

• Hospitality experience

Over time, the building itself develops brand gravity.

This creates stronger network effects, better retention, and clearer market positioning.

Several operators noted that this model may become increasingly important as office demand becomes more experience-led rather than purely functional.

Selling Offices Online

Another important conversation centered around distribution.

If the workplace product is becoming more flexible and productised, should the sales process evolve too?

The industry still relies heavily on enquiry-led leasing journeys, lengthy tours, and manual negotiations.

But many modern customers are increasingly comfortable purchasing flexible products online.

That raises important questions:

• What products can be booked online?

• Can workplace memberships & offices function more like ecommerce products?

• How much friction can be removed from the buying process?

The conversation suggested that operators who simplify the customer journey may gain a major competitive advantage.

The Bigger Takeaway

The future office market will not be won by space alone.

It will be won by operators who understand how to combine:

• Product design

• Hospitality

• Programming

• Community

• Technology

• Brand

• Flexible commercial models

• Revenue diversification

And align with how companies and individuals actually behave today.

Hybrid work is not just changing where people work.
It is forcing our industry to rethink what the office product actually is.

BOOK A DEMO WITH FLEXSPACE AI

Presented by

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Customer First, Spreadsheet Second

Roy explains why Tradestars reversed the traditional real estate process, starting with what founders and business owners actually need, then working back to the spreadsheet, instead of beginning with NIA, GIA, and rent maximisation.

In this episode of Brave Ideas, and cohost , CEO at Flexspace AI, are joined by Roy Shaby, Founder and CEO of Tradestars, for a conversation on how social commerce is creating a new category of workspace demand.

Roy has one of the most entrepreneurial stories of the season.
He started with a sushi delivery business run out of a rented kebab shop kitchen, turned that into one of London’s early dark kitchen businesses, then went on to cofound FoodStars, which was later acquired by Travis Kalanick’s (former Uber Founder/CEO) CloudKitchens business.

Today, he is applying that same entrepreneurial lens to real estate through Tradestars.

Tradestars provides offline space for online businesses, from TikTok sellers and social commerce brands to barbers, tattoo artists, beauty entrepreneurs, production companies, and digital first operators. These are not traditional office occupiers, but they are not traditional retailers either. They no longer rely on retail footfall, but still need functional, social media ready, brandable space shaped around content, community, logistics, production, client experience, and online customer acquisition.

They also discuss development costs, occupancy, churn, retention, customer acquisition, community, data, and why the rise of social commerce could become a meaningful force in the future of workspace.

Listen to the full episode to hear how Tradestars built workspace for the TikTok economy, and what landlords, investors, and operators can learn from a model that sits somewhere between coworking, light industrial, retail, production, and hospitality.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How Roy went from running a sushi delivery business out of a kebab shop kitchen to building one of London’s early dark kitchen businesses

• Why FoodStars became an early dark kitchen platform before “dark kitchens” were even a widely used term

• How the FoodStars journey led to an acquisition by Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens

• Why Tradestars was created for online entrepreneurs who still need high-quality offline operational space

• How TikTok sellers, barbers, tattoo artists, beauty entrepreneurs, and production companies are changing the demand profile for real estate

• Why social commerce businesses need workspace that supports content, logistics, client experience, and brand presentation

• How Tradestars starts with the end user first, then reverse engineers the real estate model around that customer

• How distressed and underused buildings can be repositioned into high-energy operational hubs

• Why product quality matters, and how Tradestars claims to reduce development cost without compromising the customer experience

• How Tradestars thinks about occupancy, churn, retention, and customer growth

• Why community is not just a soft benefit, but a driver of stickiness and collaboration

• How data science, CRM analysis, and marketing performance shape customer acquisition

• Why the TikTok economy could become a serious demand driver for new workspace formats

Key Takeaways for Operators

• The TikTok economy still needs physical space.
  Digital first businesses may acquire customers online, but many still need studios, production space, treatment rooms, logistics support, meeting rooms, and professional environments where they can serve clients and create content.

• Start with the customer, not the spreadsheet.
  Roy makes a direct point that Tradestars reversed the traditional real estate process. Instead of starting with net internal area, gross area, and rent maximisation, the model began with what the entrepreneur actually needs, then worked back to the underwriting.

• Different entrepreneurs need different workspace products.
  Tradestars is not traditional coworking, but many of the same Space as a Service principles apply. Members get private studios, shared amenities, hospitality, meeting rooms, podcast facilities, logistics support, and a professional front-of-house experience.

• Product quality is part of the commercial model.
  Tradestars has not treated design, lighting, toilets, common areas, and studio infrastructure as cosmetic extras. These details help members bring their own clients into the building, build their own brands, and justify staying.

• Retention is built through flexibility.
  Roy discusses how Tradestars works with members when they need to grow, shrink, or adjust. That flexibility helps maintain relationships, even when member circumstances change.

• Community becomes real when members trade with each other.
  The strongest signal is not just people attending events, it is when tattoo artists, TikTok sellers, barbers, production companies, and beauty entrepreneurs begin collaborating because they are in the same ecosystem.

• Churn needs to be interrogated, not accepted.
  Roy personally conducts exit interviews with many departing members to understand whether they are leaving because of financial pressure, growth, service issues, or a better alternative. That is operational discipline.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• Social commerce is creating new real estate demand.
  TikTok sellers, creator-led brands, beauty operators, and digital first product businesses may not need high street retail in the traditional sense, but they still need physical infrastructure. That demand does not always fit neatly into office, retail, or industrial categories.

• Distressed buildings need demand-led repositioning.
  Tradestars has taken buildings that were struggling, underused, or dilapidated, then repositioned them around a specific customer segment with clear operational needs.

• The future of workspace may not look like traditional office demand.
  The customers using Tradestars are not simply looking for desks. They need operational space that supports selling, filming, treating clients, storing products, receiving visitors, and presenting their brands.

• Diversified income can reduce concentration risk.
  By dividing buildings into many studios rather than relying on a small number of large occupiers, Tradestars creates a more diversified member base. That can reduce the impact of any single member leaving.

• CapEx discipline can create pricing advantage.
  Roy explains that Tradestars goes directly to overseas manufacturers and suppliers to reduce development costs. The claim is that this allows the business to maintain product quality while building below typical market cost.

• Operational real estate value is created through income, not just asset appreciation.
  The model is about increasing the income a building can generate by changing the use case, customer base, product design, and operating model.

• Brand and experience can support valuation.
  Tradestars is not just renting space. It is building a recognisable platform for modern entrepreneurs. If that brand creates pricing power, retention, and repeatable demand, it becomes part of the investment logic.

Behind The Scenes

This episode was recorded at Tradestars on Caledonian Road, where Caleb and Eyal toured the building before sitting down with Roy.

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

Coworking Tech Week, hosted by Pauline Roussel and Dimitar Inchev, got a lot of us thinking.

The week-long event touched quite a bit on how we can implement technology to remove the administrative burden on community teams so they can focus on what they do best, building community. As someone who has spent time in these roles, I can tell you that unnecessary admin is a real and specific drain that fragments your focus at exactly the moments you need it most.

Great idea, I’m sold.

However, there’s something else you could be doing.
Something cheaper, faster, more effective than any other strategy floating around the coworking sphere at the moment.

What if I told you you’re treating the symptom, not the cause?

In my last article, Stop Selling Community, I argued that community building cannot be an isolated act.

In order to foster community, you must participate in it.

Community builders become the beating heart of their spaces, building key relationships with members and becoming a constant, reliable support for the people around them. It’s hospitality on the surface, but the reality is something much deeper.

Let’s look at it from a member perspective, as operators are prone to doing, to ensure client satisfaction is being met.

You come into work after a crowded and long tube journey, tired and mentally preparing for your day, and you’re greeted by a cheery community host at reception. They call you by the nickname they’ve given you, ask you about an important meeting you have coming up that day, remember that problem you were having with the WiFi yesterday and tell you they’ve already fixed it for you. You walk away from the desk to your office calm, happy.

You feel seen and ready for the day ahead.

Fantastic, just what an operator wants.
Keep your members happy and keep your members coming.

Now let’s put ourselves in the shoes of that host.

You come into work after a crowded and long tube journey, tired from waking up earlier than most so you can arrive before everyone else starts their day. You put on a smile you don’t really feel and start making a mental checklist of everything going on that day. Things that went wrong, things that are going right, things to keep an eye on, what needs to be done to ensure everything runs smoothly.

One of your favourite members walks in and you greet them with joy you mean, but energy you have to manufacture. You start to ask them about their day and they go on about the usual gripes of the office - perhaps they’re having a bad day, nervous about something that went wrong in their job, or feeling pressure approaching. You sympathize, and then they ask you about your day.

Here’s where it gets complicated.

You’re comfortable with this member.
You see them every single day.
You know where they’re from, their dog’s name, their role and responsibilities, their kids’ names - maybe you’ve even met them.
You feel close to calling them a friend.
You start to relate to them and open your mouth to tell them about a problem you need to get off your chest.

But then you stop. You can’t do that.
Complaining would reflect badly on the company.
You are there to make the experience feel seamless after all. So you swallow it, say you’re doing great, let them pass, and go along with your day.

Repeat this about 20 times.

Admin work is draining. But distancing yourself from a community you’re actively encouraged to be part of - that’s a different kind of exhausting.

It’s all well and good to put systems in place that remove some of the administrative workload from your community team.
But that just shifts the nature of the work, not the work itself.

There is a burden placed on community teams that is inherent to the role. There is a glass wall between community builders and the community they foster that can be incredibly isolating - and unlike most jobs, the people best placed to understand that weight aren’t sitting at the next desk. The mental load is often shouldered alone.

What, then, is the cure?

There’s no point putting gas in the tank if the engine is broken.
How do we prevent the heartbeat of our spaces from burning out before we start to adjust the nature of their workload?

Operators, the heart of the issue is simple.
Your community team needs to have its own community.
One they feel they can be their true authentic selves in, where their gripes can be freely expressed, responsibilities shared, burdens assisted, and camaraderie found amongst people who know what they are going through.

I’ve seen some operators attempt this well by hosting monthly or annually team building events, like going to dinner or going on trips, but even then, the effort doesn’t need to (necessarily) be extended that far.

• Do your employees have a designated person they feel they can turn to for work related issues (either a mentor figure or an HR representative, just someone they feel safe opening up to)?

• Do you notice them talking with the rest of the team or are they more isolated?

• Are there regular check-ins in place to make sure the workload they are given is manageable, and do they feel comfortable enough to be honest when it isn’t?

• Are there systems in place to help manage stress, burnout, and overworking?

I’d like to shine light on what my current company, techsapiens, does.

There is a weekly team day that is encouraged and reviewed in advance to ensure it works well with everyone’s schedules.

What does team day involve?
Having lunch together that day.
That’s it!
Simple, but an effective way to encourage bonding within the team.

There are regular check-ins as well, daily, at the start of the week, and at the end of the week. There is a shared document that is passed around where employees can write down their accomplishments that are celebrated at the end of every week. Even if they aren’t documented, they are often still noticed and celebrated anyways.

You can’t foster community without being a part of it.
I still believe this is true.
But before we start to brainstorm tools to get the highest ROI on your community strategies, perhaps laying the foundation for communities to be built is a good start.

So, how can operators make the most of their community teams?
Give them a little support.

With the spectre of 2030 sustainability goals looming large, sustainability is becoming a balance sheet issue.

In the UK office market, buildings that fail to meet evolving environmental standards are no longer just missing an opportunity, they’re less liquid, harder to finance and far harder to let.

As we now represent over 100 floors in prime locations across central London, we have a clear view of how sustainability is already influencing performance. And what we’re seeing is clear: sustainability is now a direct driver of capital risk.

Tenants are demanding greener offices

Demand for office space has continued to grow but, given the wealth of options people are given today, it has also become highly selective.

Layered onto that is the companies with net zero and ESG targets of their own, meaning they’ll only lease offices with good energy ratings and avoid inefficient or high carbon buildings.

A good example of a workspace set up to thrive in this environment is the recently launched office at the Crafts Council headquarters in Islington. The Crafts Council, a charity supporting craft careers and strengthening the UK’s craft ecosystem, needed a building that aligned with its values while remaining commercially viable.

The consequences for unsustainable buildings are ultimately higher vacancy and lower rents.

Regulations are changing and financing is getting stricter

Governments are raising minimum energy performance standards and introducing carbon reporting and penalties, all working towards the 2030 sustainable development goals.

At Crafts Council House, we addressed these changes proactively. The offices sit within a converted chapel and Grade II listed building, an asset type often perceived as difficult to upgrade. Through thoughtful environmental improvements, from enhanced thermal performance to upgraded building services, the building’s EPC rating improved from D to B.

That upgrade, delivered by Soul Spaces at the end of 2025, demonstrates that even complex, heritage assets can futureproof themselves with the right strategy.

Meanwhile, lenders are also tightening criteria. Some UK banks are now rewarding improvement in operational energy performance which is often EPC-based. Benefits typically include fee free arrangements or discounted margins, making it a worthwhile path to explore. Sustainability linked loans, SLLs, are becoming more common and some lenders now offer “transition loans” allowing EPC C–G assets to access green labelled finance if a credible retrofit plan is in place.

Those that can’t evidence progress now risk higher capital costs, with poor performers facing higher interest rates or refused loans.

Asset values are being “repriced”

Sustainability is now being priced in by occupiers, lenders and investors alike. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that EPC and ESG performance are now actively influencing lending terms and market liquidity. Lenders are assessing future risk, obsolescence and asset viability through EPC ratings, operational efficiency and the quality of proposed retrofits.

Poorly executed retrofits are a growing capital risk

The biggest mistake landlords can make is retrofitting cheaply or reactively, only to face further refits later when the space won’t let or meet lender expectations.

Lower cost refurbs and quick fixes may look fine today, but fail under tighter regulation and refinancing, meaning landlords end up paying twice. In contrast, an ‘invest once, invest properly’ mindset can protect asset value and income streams, and aligns assets with how banks and investors are already thinking.

Knight Frank analysis of London offices shows that assets upgraded from EPC C/D to EPC B+ narrowed the capital value gap to prime stock by 19 percentage points. Only comprehensive, performance-led upgrades deliver meaningful value recovery.

Sustainability investment is an asset and form of commercial foresight. It helps to protect asset value, ‘lettability’ and funding options over time. Buildings with weaker EPC ratings face a higher risk of obsolescence as regulation tightens toward 2030, making them less attractive to finance or refinance.

In short, ignoring sustainability means making an active decision to accept higher leasing risk, tighter funding, weaker liquidity and accelerated capital erosion.

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

Beyond Occupancy and Big Deals

In this episode of Brave Ideas, Caleb Parker and cohost Eyal Lasker, CEO at Flexspace AI, are joined by Jo Mapp, Commercial Director at Wizu, for a conversation on the commercial realities of building resilient flex office revenue.

Jo brings a deeply commercial perspective to this conversation.
She has spent years inside the flex office sector, including more than a decade at NewFlex (where her and Caleb teamed up to launch his Bold brand with 60% occupancy, and 90% in the first 90 days), and today she is helping lead the next phase of growth at Wizu and Flexico as the business expands across the UK.

The conversation also explores building layout, managed office competition, customer engagement and mix, community, website conversion, meeting room utilisation, website optimisation, lead flow, viewing conversion, churn & retention, meeting room utilisation, and breakeven occupancy.

Listen to the full episode to hear what operators, landlords, and investors need to understand about flex revenue quality, and why the healthiest flex businesses are built on more than headline occupancy.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why Wizu created Flexico as a separate brand to serve different landlord opportunities and asset profiles.

• How Jo thinks about the difference between sales focus and commercial focus.

• Why retention is one of the most important drivers of long-term profitability in flex.

• Why bigger customers are not always better customers.

• How smaller, more diversified private office suites can reduce risk and improve resilience.

• Why Wizu is increasingly focused on offices for teams of around 4 to 20 people.

• How managed offices are changing the competitive landscape, especially for larger requirements.

• Why building layout matters, and why some buildings simply are not right for flex.

• How Wizu monitors churn risk through customer feedback, quarterly meetings, engagement levels, and space usage.

• Why community matters, but may not be enough on its own to keep every customer.

• How meeting rooms, day passes, coworking, and virtual offices contribute to the wider P&L.

• Why website experience, live chat, call-to-action design, and online booking all influence lead conversion.

• Why Jo tracks leads, viewings, deals, conversion rates, cost per lead, and cost per sale on a daily basis.

Key Takeaways for Operators

• Retention is the foundation of resilient revenue.
  Jo makes the point clearly, you cannot build pricing power on top of weak retention. If customers are leaving, pushing price harder can make the problem worse. Strong operators understand when they are in a position of strength, and when the better commercial decision is to protect the customer relationship.

• Large requirements can create hidden fragility.
  A 50-person customer may look attractive in the short term, but when they leave, the void can be painful. Jo explains why Wizu is increasingly focused on smaller, more diversified offices, because they are easier to backfill and create less exposure to any single customer.

• Product mix needs to be commercially disciplined.
  The right mix of private offices, coworking, meeting rooms, and event space depends on the building, market, customer base, and revenue potential. Every SqFt needs a job. If an event space is underused, or a coworking area is too large, operators need the discipline to rethink it.

• Community has to be operational, not just emotional.
  Wizu places real importance on community, but Jo is realistic about its role. Events, onsite culture, customer relationships, and engagement all matter, but community alone will not fix a weak product, poor pricing, or low utilisation.

• Sales data should tell you where the business is breaking.
  Jo looks closely at lead flow, viewings, deals, conversion rates, cost per lead, and cost per sale. Those metrics help identify whether the issue is marketing, sales follow-up, building quality, pricing, or product fit.

• Your website is not a brochure anymore.
  Eyal makes the point that too many coworking operators still treat their websites like online catalogues rather than digital stores. If customers can book hotels, flights, restaurants, and products online, they increasingly expect the same frictionless buying journey from flexible workplaces.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• Resilient flex revenue is not the same as high occupancy.
  A building can look healthy on paper but still carry weak revenue quality if the income is concentrated, customers are at risk of churn, or pricing has been pushed beyond the level the product can justify.

• The best customer is not always the biggest customer.
  Large requirements can fill space quickly, but they can also create operational and financial risk when they leave. A more diversified customer base may create a stronger revenue platform over time.

• Not every building works for flex.
  Jo is direct about this. Deep floor plates, oversized layouts, or buildings that cannot be divided effectively into smaller offices may not suit the model. Landlords need to understand the operational requirements of flex before assuming it can solve a vacancy problem.

• Managed offices are changing the underwriting conversation.
  For larger suites, especially around 1,500 SqFt and above, operators are increasingly competing with managed office solutions. That affects pricing, product positioning, and how landlords should think about demand.

• Breakeven occupancy depends on the cost base.
  Jo shares that, for Wizu, breakeven office occupancy is roughly around 80 percent on average, though this varies by building. That benchmark matters because landlords and investors need to understand the operating leverage behind the model.

• Brand architecture matters.
  Wizu and Flexico serve different market needs. Wizu is design-led and service-focused, while Flexico was created to serve more value-led opportunities and landlord assets that do not suit the Wizu brand. That distinction matters because the wrong brand on the wrong building can weaken both performance and positioning.

Behind The Scenes

We want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where this episode was recorded, for their brilliant podcast studio and hospitality throughout the season. Tap here to book their podcast studio yourself!

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

Join a Brave Ideas Event

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

The Question Landlords Should Be Asking

Landlords have been asking whether flexible workspace belongs in their buildings for years.

But is that even the right question?

In this episode of Brave Ideas, Caleb Parker speaks with Wybo Wijnbergen, Co-Founder and CEO of infinitSpace, the company behind Beyond, a flexible workplace platform built in partnership with landlords.

Wybo brings a rare perspective to this conversation.
He was previously Managing Director for WeWork in Europe,
where he helped open 50 locations in four years.

Today, he is building infinitSpace around a different model, helping landlords operate flexible workplace through partnership structures designed to improve occupier experience and strengthen asset performance.

The conversation starts with the origin story of infinitSpace, including how the business launched during COVID, raised its first million euros, and won its first management agreement before the company itself had a track record.

Then the episode quickly moves into a bigger question:
Are landlords still evaluating flex through the wrong lens?

Wybo explains why occupancy alone is not enough, why higher rent is not always the better decision, why performance clauses need to protect both landlord and operator, and why the quality and diversification of occupiers inside a flex space may matter more than the industry currently recognises.

Listen to the full episode to hear how infinitSpace is helping landlords rethink flexible workplace, from data and yield management to brand, retention, underwriting, and valuation.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How infinitSpace went from a COVID-era startup idea to a growing flexible workplace platform across London, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

• Why winning the first landlord partnership was less about company track record and more about trust, timing, urgency, and personal credibility.

• How Wybo’s experience opening 50 WeWork locations in Europe helped create confidence with the first landlord partner.

• Why management agreements need clear performance clauses on both sides.

• Why operators also need protection when landlords fail to maintain the quality of the asset or invest properly in the space.

• Why brand is not just design, furniture, or materials, but the full perception of experience from first touchpoint to final interaction.

• How infinitSpace thinks about integrating the Beyond brand into the wider asset rather than creating a disconnected flex product inside the building.

• Why yield management is still underdeveloped across parts of the flexible workspace industry.

• How operators should evaluate retention, churn, pricing, void periods, customer acquisition cost, and historical demand before deciding whether to keep or replace an occupier.

• Why good operators need the discipline to walk away from buildings where the underwriting does not work.

• How infinitSpace is using AI, local market data, and internal systems to speed up underwriting and help landlords evaluate potential flex opportunities.

• Why Wybo believes flexible workspace should be judged not only by occupancy and NOI, but also by the quality and diversification of occupiers using the space.

Key Takeaways for Operators

• The first deal is a trust problem.
  Wybo is clear that the first management agreement was the hardest. The company had no operating track record, but he and his co-founder had conviction, relevant experience, and the right landlord opportunity at the right time. For operators, the lesson is blunt, the model does not sell itself.

• Performance clauses should protect both sides.
  If an operator underperforms, the landlord needs a way out. But if a landlord fails to maintain the asset, invest in the space, or preserve the quality needed to deliver the brand experience, the operator also needs protection.

• Occupancy is not the whole story.
  A building can be full and still underperform. Operators need to understand revenue quality, product mix, pricing power, meeting room usage, contract terms, churn risk, and the real economics behind each customer.

• Higher rent is not always better.
  Replacing a below-market occupier may look attractive on paper, but the operator needs to account for void periods, broker fees, sales commissions, marketing cost, and the historical demand for that specific office or product type.

• Bad buildings can damage good operators.
  Wybo makes the point clearly, there is no value in operating 100 buildings if a large share of them do not work. Underperforming locations consume time, distract the team, disappoint landlords, damage the brand, and pull attention away from stronger-performing assets.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• The question is not just, “Should we add flex?”
  The better question is, what role should flexible workplace play inside the asset strategy? Is it there to reduce vacancy, attract occupiers, improve service, create optionality, diversify income, support enterprise demand, or strengthen the building’s wider performance?

• Flex should not be treated as a bolt-on amenity.
  Wybo argues that the flex experience should feel integrated into the building. The design, service model, brand, and operational experience should support the wider asset, not sit apart from it.

• Management agreements require active partnership.
  In a management agreement, the landlord is not just collecting rent. They are funding the space, sharing in the outcome, and depending on the operator’s performance. That requires better reporting, better alignment, and more sophisticated questions.

• Data changes the quality of the decision.
  Better underwriting, forecasting, yield management, and market intelligence can help landlords understand whether flex works in a specific asset, at a specific price point, for a specific demand profile.

• Occupier quality may be under-recognised in valuation.
  One of Wybo’s strongest points comes near the end of the episode. If a flexible workspace contains a diversified base of high-quality occupiers, including enterprise teams and strong-growth businesses, landlords and valuers may need to look beyond the operator agreement and consider the value of the underlying occupier mix.

Behind The Scenes

This episode was recorded at FlexTribes by Space Plus in Aldgate, London.

Wybo had flown in from Amsterdam a the night before the event, and we both joined the Coworking operator dinner, hosted by Flexspace AI, the night before recording, which gave us a chance to compare notes on the market before sitting down for the podcast.

Before we recorded, we both sat in several FlexTribes sessions covering topics like yield management, retention, management agreements, profitability, and valuation. Those conversations became part of the backdrop for the episode, and you can hear that in the way we debrief some of the ideas live during the interview.

Brave Ideas Season 17

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

Join a Brave Ideas Event

In February 2026, Wall Street wiped nearly $12 billion from the market values of the world’s biggest real estate brokerages in two trading days.

CBRE had just reported strong revenue growth.
JLL was profitable.
Nobody was having a bad quarter.

Investors were pricing in something else entirely, the possibility that AI will eventually erode the value of human expertise in a business that has always run on knowing things others do not 1.

The reaction was covered widely across the property press.
AI disruption fears hit CBRE, JLL, Cushman & Wakefield, Colliers and Newmark, while the conversation spread quickly into Europe, affecting firms including Savills, IWG, British Land and Landsec.

The firms pushed back, share prices recovered somewhat, and the conversation has kept going ever since, with senior figures across the industry now openly debating what AI actually means for how deals get done.2

Having spent 22 years in commercial property, and the last 7 in flex offices, I find myself watching this debate with interest. The question of whether AI threatens brokerage is real and worth taking seriously. What tends to get missed is the deeper structural problem that AI is now making impossible to ignore.

What Brokers Actually Sold

For a long time, a broker’s value was tied to knowing things.

• Which buildings had availability before the listing went public?

• Which landlords would negotiate on price?

• Who was about to sign a big lease two streets away?

That information advantage was real,
it was hard to replicate, and clients paid for it.
That is changing.

Data platforms now surface buildings in seconds.
AI can pull comparable rents, amenities and lease terms without a phone call. CBRE has said it expects to cut research costs by around 25% through AI adoption. That says less about crisis and more about the fact that a meaningful part of what brokerages have always done can now be automated.3

The brokers I respect are not especially alarmed by this.
The work they find most interesting and most valuable to clients was never really about the database query.

It was the judgment call.
The read on whether a landlord will flex on fit-out.
The understanding of how much space a company actually needs versus how much it thinks it needs.

That part is harder to automate, and it matters more.

Where Brokers Fit Into This

Good brokers would benefit from better data as much as anyone.

When the baseline information is clearer and independently verified, the advisory conversation shifts. Rather than unpicking what a provider actually offers beneath the marketing language, a broker can focus on whether a space genuinely fits a client’s culture, how it handles headcount growth, and what the renewal terms look like in practice.

JLL CEO Christian Ulbrich put it well in a widely covered industry discussion when he said:

“The train has left the station, and it is going at Japanese speed levels of train, very, very fast.”4

The brokers who will do well over the next decade are those who apply the same logic to occupier advice. The market will get more transparent. AI will continue to compress the cost of research, and that will keep raising the question of what advisors are actually adding.

The answer, for the good ones, is judgment applied to better information.
The ones who relied on controlling access to the information in the first place should be paying attention right now.

Flex Has Its Own Version of This Problem

The flexible workspace sector is a useful case study because the transparency gap is already visible and is causing friction.

London alone has hundreds of flex buildings run by dozens of operators, a market that has grown significantly over the past decade and continues to expand.

Yet the process of choosing a workplace still produces a lot of friction.

You find the same words everywhere:

• Plug and Play

• Premium

• Grade A

• Community

• Flexible terms

None of it is technically false, and very little of it helps anyone make a decision.

The commission model that underpins most flex brokerage is not inherently the problem. Good brokers add real value, particularly on complex requirements.

The issue lies further back.
AI will surface more of this information faster, but there is a lot of AI slop even within paid-for data services.
The data underneath still needs to be trustworthy.

Operator-supplied marketing language has a role, but it cannot be the only basis on which companies, brokers, or AI-powered search tools compare workplaces.

That is the problem Office Tier List is focused on.
Improving the integrity of the underlying data so that whatever comes next, whether a broker recommendation, an AI-powered shortlist, or a company doing its own research, starts from something more reliable.

A More Honest Market

Commercial real estate runs on relationships and probably always will.

What AI is changing, gradually and then quite quickly, is the quality of the information those relationships are built on.

That creates real pressure in parts of the market that have historically relied on opacity. It creates an opportunity for operators with genuine quality to demonstrate it, and for advisors who can work with verified data rather than around the lack of it.

AI will not remove the need for brokers, operators, or advisors.
But it will make weak claims easier to expose, weak data harder to hide, and weak advisory models harder to defend.

That is not the end of brokerage.
It is the beginning of a more accountable market.

Zoe Ellis-Moore is CEO and Founder of Spaces to Places, a research and marketing consultancy for the flexible workspace sector, and Founder of Office Tier List, an independent verification platform for flexible offices in London.

Presented by

Learn how Flexspace AI is transforming coworking with their ecommerce revenue platform, featuring SmartPricing Agent, an AI-powered dynamic pricing engine. Tap here

Scaling Without Losing the Soul of the Brand

In this episode of Brave Ideas, Caleb Parker and co-host Eyal Lasker sit down with Alex Young, Managing Director at Projects, the Brighton-born coworking brand now expanding into new cities across the UK.

Alex brings a rare mix of operational discipline, brand instinct, and genuine community-led leadership. She started her journey with Projects on the front desk, went on to build experience across other leading workspace brands, and has now returned to lead the next phase of growth as Projects expands beyond Brighton into places like Tunbridge Wells, London, Bristol, and Cambridge.

This conversation gets into what it really takes to scale a coworking brand without losing the culture, community, and hospitality-led experience that made it work in the first place.

Listen to the full episode to hear how Projects thinks about product mix, revenue quality, member experience, spatial planning, AI, and the commercial trade-offs behind building a profitable coworking brand.

Further Reading

In the episode, Caleb references an interview with Alana, Projects’ Brand Manager, and on brand and brand activation. It is a useful companion piece to this conversation, especially if you want to go deeper on how Projects thinks about brand as a driver of community, culture, and member experience.

The Inclusive Coworker

Creating Content That Connects – and Reflects Your Coworking Culture, Community and Vibe, with Alana Harris

Brand Manager Alana Harris lives the Projects experience every day. Based in Brighton, Alana not only shapes the coworking space brand from the inside out but is also immersed in the community that defines it…

Read more

8 months ago · 2 likes · Lucy McInally

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How Alex went from working on the front desk at Projects to becoming Managing Director.

• Why every Projects team member has worked on the front desk, and why that experience shapes the company’s approach to service, community, and operations.

• How Projects grew from one Brighton building into a platform now expanding into new UK cities.

• Why Projects would rather sacrifice density than compromise the member experience.

• How transparent pricing can support retention, trust, and long-term revenue growth.

• Why brand values matter commercially, not just creatively.

• How Projects thinks about balancing coworking, private offices, enterprise suites, meeting rooms, event spaces, gyms, and lifestyle amenities.

• Why not every amenity needs to generate direct revenue to create business value.

• What Projects learned from replacing an underused podcast suite with a specialist podcast production partner.

• How Alex thinks about designing flexible, multifunctional spaces that can adapt without frustrating members.

• Why AI should help teams become more human, not less.

• How digital discovery, ecommerce, chatbots, and booking journeys are changing the way customers interact with flex operators.

Key Takeaways for Operators

• Retention is not a soft metric, it is a commercial strategy.
  Alex is clear that Projects prioritises member experience, trust, and long-term relationships over squeezing every possible desk into the floor plan. That means designing spaces where people feel they can move, work, meet, and connect without feeling overcrowded.

• Density can damage the product if it erodes the member experience.
  Projects deliberately avoids overpacking coworking areas because the brand promise is built around feeling at home at work. If members cannot find space to work, take calls, meet people, or relax, the product breaks.

• Transparent pricing builds trust.
  Projects publishes clear pricing and approaches rate increases with honesty. The goal is not to surprise members with hidden costs or inconsistent deals, but to build enough trust that members understand the value they are paying for.

• Community teams are the backbone of the business.
  Alex makes the point directly, the front desk and community team make or break a coworking space. They are the first impression, the daily relationship, and often the reason members stay.

• Amenities should be judged by their strategic value, not just direct revenue.
  The gym at Projects does not directly make money, but it reinforces the lifestyle-led brand promise. The event space could generate more income as an office, but it plays an important role in community, brand, and local market activation.

• Do not chase trends without a long-term plan.
  Alex uses the example of reformer pilates to explain the risk of building around what is fashionable today. Projects is thinking about multifunctional spaces that can serve yoga, pilates, physiotherapy, and other uses over time, rather than locking into a trend that may fade.

• AI should remove admin friction, not replace human judgement.
  For Projects, AI is useful where it reduces manual work, improves reporting, helps teams spot patterns, and frees people up to spend more time with members.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• A strong coworking brand can improve revenue quality by attracting aligned customers.
  Projects is not just filling space, it is curating a member mix around shared values, culture, and lifestyle. That matters because customer alignment can reduce friction, improve retention, and support pricing power.

• Occupancy alone is not enough.
  Projects looks at occupancy, average desk rate, churn, monthly revenue, and member retention. The more important question is whether the revenue is sustainable, diversified, and aligned with the product.

• Enterprise demand can be valuable, but only if it does not overwhelm the community.
  Projects accommodates larger suites, including around 100 seats, but avoids letting enterprise customers dominate the building. The aim is to preserve the broader community dynamic while still serving larger companies.

• Flexible design protects long-term asset performance.
  Alex is honest about the risk of giving members something, then taking it away. For landlords and investors, the lesson is simple, design choices need to account for long-term adaptability, not just launch appeal.

• Lifestyle amenities can support pricing and retention, even when they do not directly monetise.
  A gym, event space, rooftop bar, café, or wellness room may not always produce direct revenue, but they can strengthen the value proposition and help justify premium positioning.

• Local market knowledge matters.
  Projects is not copy-pasting Brighton into every city. The team looks at the local community, local businesses, local partnerships, and the specific demand profile of each market before shaping the product.

• Operators need real operational expertise.
  This conversation is a reminder that coworking is not just real estate with desks. It requires brand, hospitality, community, sales discipline, pricing strategy, technology, and constant operational judgement.

Behind The Scenes

We want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where this episode was recorded, for their brilliant podcast studio and hospitality throughout the season. Tap here to book their podcast studio yourself!

After the shoot, Caleb, Alex and Eyal ran into some other flex CEOs in the Work.Life reception.

Brave Ideas Season 17

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.

Join a Brave Ideas Event

In flexible workspace, brand isn’t something you can just build

You can lay the right foundations and steer the ship in the right direction, but ultimately, it’s something your community builds and then, when fostered in the right way, protects.

The community, or rather communities (we’ll get into that later) you build are your brand. Without them, you just have space.

And it might be the nicest, most gorgeous space in the world, but businesses don’t buy space. They buy community.

And community building is easy to get wrong.

It’s all in the duality

Succeeding in building a strong community, and therefore brand, as a flex operator, means welcoming duality. It’s a fine balance between allowing individual site communities to blossom and also ensuring that there’s community building across sites too.

The aim isn’t consistency, per se, it’s coherence.

What’s key is neither forcing your brand on individual sites to the detriment of local community development, nor neglecting to bridge the gap between site communities and making sure your brand values are spread throughout.

Start by honouring the niche communities within each space

One of our goals is to encourage micro-communities to grow from our spaces.

For example, The Bradfield Centre is a site largely dominated by tech-forward businesses, housing startups, innovators and research projects.

Mantle has developed a thriving internal and external community in respect of this industry that is requisite of Cambridge itself, and our mission has been to cultivate relationships with the organisations and networks that matter most to its members.

When a building like The Bradfield Centre begins to form its own traditions and interests, usually with a gentle nudge from us, we celebrate that.

It’s these things that make each location feel authentic and meaningful to its members.

Individuality doesn’t mean fragmentation

Alongside creating zones of business community at each space, an equally important goal of Mantle’s is to make members feel part of something bigger.

And it’s how we demonstrate these through every interaction with the business that inspires and welcomes similarly minded people and communities to develop at each location.

These values show up in every site, even if how they manifest looks different from building to building. There’s consistency in those values.

Creating shared experiences

Every Mantle Space member is invited to every Mantle Space event, no matter where it’s held. This not only encourages collaboration across sites, but also allows members to experience the different cultures at each location. They get to meet each other face-to-face and build those all-important connections across the wider Mantle Space community.

This is embodied by Go Meet events, which were established over ten years ago with this clear purpose.

Go Meet runs across all Mantle centres, with over 40 events hosted each year, each focusing on a dedicated guest speaker addressing a single core subject. The conditions for Go Meet are designed to encourage meaningful conversation between members.

Seeing online as an extension of your physical community

Social media is often an untapped tool in bridging the micro-community gaps.

Our online presence is where all those smaller site-specific communities come together in a new kind of shared space. Social media allows members from different locations to see what’s happening elsewhere, celebrate each other’s wins, and enjoy a sense of belonging that goes beyond their home base.

From an operator perspective, we use social media to:

• Showcase the unique features and energy of each location

• Amplify stories and successes from across all sites equally

• Highlight site-specific events, but within the context of the wider community

• Reinforce our brand values consistently across every site

Social media and online spaces allow us to keep the conversation flowing between communities and sites. It helps to ensure that every member and location knows that they are a very important part of the wider ecosystem. And it acts as an extension of our events too.

A great example of this is , which offers one of Mantle’s most distinctive event settings, The Walled Garden. The ideal setting has made Thremhall events particularly shareable on social media, and they have consistently been among the most well-attended events across the Mantle group.

Ultimately, flex space brands don’t succeed because of square footage, but because they earn relevance with their community.

The brands that will truly fly are those that understand their communities as ecosystems, listening first and responding authentically after.

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 10

Recorded before the recent stock market turbulence that he references mid-episode

This episode is the 2nd of a two-part conversation.

Key Timestamps

• [00:41:00] The exponential efficiency curve —why the cost of a given level of AI intelligence has fallen 10x per year for the last three to four years

• [00:42:00] Right-sizing AI models — why state-of-the-art frontier models are already overkill for most real estate tasks, and what that means for cost

• [00:43:00] The Apple business model for AI — how open source models will converge with on-device computing to shift processing away from data centres

• [00:45:00] Data centre energy and the 3% myth —why the macro figure is less alarming than the localised grid constraints in Virginia and across the US

• [00:47:00] AI optimisation of the built environment — why DeepMind cut Google's data centre energy use by 40%, and why most buildings leave 10–20% on the table

• [00:51:00] Materials science as the next frontier — DeepMind's investment in low-cost sustainable materials and the question of when solar glazing becomes viable at scale

• [00:54:00] Europe's innovation deficit — why high energy prices create demand but regulatory instinct stifles supply, and the poor storytelling around net zero

• [00:58:00] Sustainability as a by product of technical buildings — Antony's argument that a fully sensored, efficient building is already most of the way to sustainable

• [00:59:00] Institutional mandates haven't changed — European investors still require sustainable assets, they just stopped saying ESG out loud
  [01:01:00] The hospitality niche — real estate assets designed for digital detox, 'human as the new luxury', and the demand side that might pull sustainable development forward

• [01:04:00] How to eat the sustainability elephant — Antony's argument for ignoring what you can't move and doing what you can within your own patch

• [01:07:00] The competitive threat to incumbents — how well-funded spinouts with domain expertise and AI-first architecture could undercut established firms on margin

• [01:09:00] Alex on building a sustainability due diligence tool in three evenings using Claude Code — and the question of what actually creates defensible value

• [01:11:00] The three components of real AI value — data access, orchestration across systems, and trust; why software is the easiest part

• [01:15:00] Hallucination and the trust problem — why even cited, credible-looking sources can be entirely fabricated, and why domain knowledge is the verification layer

• [01:16:00] The CRE Automation Matrix — Antony's four-quadrant framework for deciding which real estate tasks to automate: plumbing vs cognition, easy vs hard to verify

• [01:19:00] Making sustainability economically viable for the whole market — how AI could bring the cost of high-quality analysis down from Blackstone-level to mid-market

• [01:20:00] Closing question: What one thing would Antony want changed?

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Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

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If you want the short version, watch the debrief below.

Straight after the session, Caleb Parker sat down with Morgan Pierstorff and Thomas Pearson to break down the key question landlords are asking right now:

How do you actually de-risk flex space?

What came through clearly is that this is not about avoiding risk.
It is about understanding it, structuring for it, and staying close enough to the detail to act early.

The conversation in the room went further.

On Thursday, Brave Ideas teamed up with GCUC UK to host How to De-Risk Flex Space at JMW Solicitors in the City of London, sponsored by NCG Global.

Two panels, operators and landlords, approached the same challenge from different sides of the table.

They largely arrived at the same conclusions.

Panel 1: The Operator View

Build the Plan B into the deal

One theme ran through the operator panel, structure matters from day one.

Management agreements can take years to negotiate, but the critical point is not how long they take, it is what they include.

If an operator underperforms, the landlord needs the ability to step in quickly without the asset losing momentum. If the partnership performs, that same clarity keeps everyone aligned.

The deals that struggle are usually the ones that avoid defining this upfront.

Integration drives performance

There was strong alignment on what good looks like.

Flex should not sit in isolation.
It should influence how the building operates and is experienced.

That includes:

• front of house

• amenity and club spaces

• leasing strategy and positioning

As Rupert Dean noted, operators are often more effective at selling space because they are selling a story, not just a desk.

See the event photo gallery

In a takeover, the humans come first

David Kaiser shared the takeover of a 110,000 SqFt former WeWork in Hoxton, with just two weeks to prepare.

Occupancy was below 30 percent, with desks at £180.

The turnaround:

• Occupancy moved to over 90 percent

• Average pricing reached £440

• Some deals exceeded £500

The key lesson was not about pricing or fit-out.

It was about people.

Staff and members needed reassurance immediately.
The first week set the tone. Get that right, and the building stabilises.
Get it wrong, and performance continues to decline.

Panel 2: The Landlord and Advisor View

Flex supports the wider asset

Flex works best when it supports the overall leasing strategy.

Paul Smith shared a Manchester example:

• 30,000 SqFt of flex within a 180,000 SqFt building helped lease the rest of the asset

• A nearby building that went fully flex was rejected by the investment market and is now being repositioned

The strongest outcomes come from using it to enhance an already viable asset.

Transparency is critical

A consistent point from the landlord side was visibility.

Landlords need more than high-level summaries.

They need access to:

• regular financial reporting

• occupier data

• deal structures and incentives

Without that, issues only become visible once they have escalated.

As Thomas Pearson highlighted, most of the legal drafting in these agreements is designed for when things go wrong.

Break clauses, step-in rights and performance thresholds are what protect the asset.

Managed office models are gaining traction

Managed offices came up as one of the clearest growth areas.

The reason is simple, they can sit between traditional leasing and short-term flex. Higher covenant customers get more flexibility than a conventional lease, often on 2 to 5 year terms, while landlords get more income visibility than they would from desk-by-desk coworking.

That matters for valuation.

The model also aligns the economics more cleanly.
Landlords, with cheaper cost of capital, can fund the CapEx.
Operators can run the space and deliver the customer experience.
Customers get flexibility without sacrificing quality or control.

That is why managed offices feel less like a niche product and more like a meaningful part of the next office cycle.

Expect to see more of it over the next 18 months.

See the event photo gallery

The Through-Line

From both panels, the conclusions were consistent:

• Integration outperforms bolt-on

• Transparency reduces risk

• Structure determines outcome

Flex is no longer the unknown.
But poorly structured flex still is.

What’s Next

Thank you to JMW Solicitors and NCG Global for sponsoring, and to Caleb, Lisa, Rupert, David, Michael, Morgan, Thomas and Paul for contributing so openly.

And to everyone who made it in despite the tube strikes.

If you want to continue the conversation, Brave Ideas heads to Manchester on 19 May for Hack the New Office Product for Hybrid Companies, an operator-led working session at MediaCity.

GCUC UK returns with Manchester on 4–5 June and London on 8–9 October.

See the event photo gallery

Photos by Ashley Ford Photography

Redefining how brands big & small connect and thrive in the digital world

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Most coworking brands talk about hospitality. Far fewer actually deliver it.

In this episode of Brave Ideas, Caleb Parker sits down with James Panepinto, Group Ancillary Revenue Manager at Clockwise, to unpack what hospitality really means in a coworking environment, and why getting it right can directly impact retention, pricing power, and long-term profitability.

Joining as co-host is Eyal Lasker, CEO of Flexspace AI in the MUTE Showroom in Clerkenwell London.

Check out James’s Brave Ideas article on hospitality and grand gestures.

James also shares his work with FLOC, a platform helping support the next generation of leaders in coworking and flex.

Listen now and hear why the best coworking brands are not built on desks and WiFi alone.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

sponsored by MUTE

• Why James believes coworking belongs in the hospitality category, not the serviced office category

• What hospitality actually looks like in practice, beyond slogans and big gestures

• Why the smallest details often matter more than the grand statements

• How Clockwise thinks about community programming and why it must evolve with the people in the building

• Why operators should not force a static events calendar onto a dynamic member base

• How hospitality and community work together to improve retention and long-term value

• Why strong systems and better pricing tools can free teams up to focus on the human side of the business

• How ancillary revenue, events, and wider business community activation fit into a stronger operating model

Key Takeaways for Operators

• Hospitality is not a bolt-on, it is core to the coworking product

• Retention improves when members feel seen, looked after, and genuinely part of something

• Community cannot be forced, but it can be cultivated with care and consistency

• Programming should reflect the real needs of the current member base, not a static annual plan

• Great systems matter because they create more time for teams to deliver meaningful member experience

• Ancillary revenue should support the member experience, not compete with it

Key Takeaways for Investors and Landlords

• The best performing coworking brands are not just selling space, they are creating reasons for people to stay

• Hospitality-led operations can strengthen retention and support pricing power over time

• Member experience is not soft or secondary, it is directly tied to income durability

• Buildings that feel like commodities will compete on price, buildings that feel like places can compete on value

• Operators who understand both community and commercial discipline are better positioned to create sustainable performance

Behind The Scenes

This episode was recorded in the Mute showroom in Clerkenwell before an invite only operator dinner later that evening. James & Caleb used to work together, launching the Bold coworking brand in Manchester.

This conversation is part of Brave Ideas Season 17, where we are digging into what actually makes coworking profitable, from hospitality and community to pricing, operations, and underwriting.

Join our next Brave Ideas Event

Net Effective Rent (NER) is usually the first number anyone reaches for.

It’s the reflex move when comparing leasing strategies:
Run the NER, see which option looks better, move on.

And it works well enough when you’re comparing two incentive packages on the same lease length.

But as an owner, when deciding between traditional leasing and a Cat A+ buildout program, the standard metrics can mislead you.

The math may not be wrong, but each output is missing something different.

Two compelling strategies, one broken comparison

The case for Cat A+ is real:

Invest capital upfront, offer space that’s ready to occupy, and compress vacancy from months to weeks.

Tenants pay a premium for speed and certainty.
Leasing velocity improves, and carrying costs fall.

The case for traditional leasing is equally strong:

Longer leases, fewer turnover events, lower operational overhead, simpler asset management. And it carries a third advantage that rarely makes it into the NER comparison.

Valuers and lenders tend to treat it better.
A longer WAULT, a more predictable income stream, a simpler story at refinancing and exit. That has real value, even if it doesn’t show up in the headline rent.

Both strategies make money.

In a rising market, you can defend either one after the fact.
That’s part of what makes this comparison so difficult,
and so easy to get wrong without realising it.

Asking the right question with the wrong tool

Think of each leasing strategy as a bond.
You deploy capital, you receive a stream of income, and eventually the instrument matures and you make a new decision.

The question is:
Which bond offers the better return?

Not which one has more cash flows, or a higher coupon on paper,
but what it actually yields relative to what it costs.

Standard metrics each fail to answer that question in their own way.

NER is like comparing bonds by their stated coupon while ignoring the price you paid. It averages incentives across the lease term without accounting for your cost of capital. The number looks like a yield, but it isn’t one.

Net Operating Income (NOI) is closer to counting total coupon payments over the life of the bond without accounting for what you paid for it. More payments sounds better, but if the capital required to generate those payments was higher, the comparison is no longer honest. Cat A+ buildout costs typically sit below the NOI line, which can make that strategy look more attractive than it actually is.

Net Present Value (NPV) gets the cost of capital right, but penalises shorter instruments simply by having fewer cash flows to discount. A 10-year traditional lease will almost always produce a higher NPV than a Cat A+ cycle, not because it performs better, but because it runs longer. You can make traditional leasing win on NPV almost by definition. It’s the same mistake as rejecting a 7-year bond because a 10-year one exists.

Each metric can point you in a different direction.

That’s the problem.

The winner’s curse

Here’s what makes this uncomfortable:
Both strategies will likely generate positive returns.
That means whichever one you chose, you can probably defend it afterwards.

The model supported it.
The returns came in.
Case closed.

But that’s not the same as making a good decision.
If your metric pointed to Cat A+ and Cat A+ performed well, did you generate alpha?

Or did you just avoid being obviously wrong in a market that rewarded both options?

In asset management, the standard is higher than that.

You’re being paid to find the right answer, not to land on it by accident.

In a competitive market, the teams that price these decisions correctly know which assets reward a Cat A+ strategy and which ones don’t, and they bid accordingly.

That means they’ll outbid you for the assets you should want, and you’ll end up winning the ones you shouldn’t.

You won the auction.
Congratulations.
But in real estate, overpaying in an auction is just a slow way to lose.

In a rising market, this is easy to miss.
Assets appreciate, strategies look vindicated, LPs earn a return.
But as markets tighten, ‘we made money’ stops being a sufficient answer,
and it becomes very hard to explain why your competitors made more.

A better way to think about it

What you need is the equivalent of bond yield:

A single number that captures what each strategy actually returns per month, net of everything it costs to run, across its complete life.

That’s what Equivalent Monthly Annuity (EMA) does.

The term difference stops being an objection. Just as you’d compare a 7-year and a 10-year bond by their yield and reinvest at maturity, EMA lets you compare a Cat A+ cycle and a traditional lease on equal footing and make a new decision when each one matures.

The duration is already in the calculation.

The conversation this unlocks

Once the financial baseline is settled, the real questions can surface.

Which strategy fits the business plan:
Steady long-term income, or a more active management model with higher turnover? How will each approach be valued at exit? And does your strategy match what a buyer will underwrite?

How will lenders treat the income?

Because a portfolio of short, rolling Cat A+ tenancies looks different to a funder than a building anchored by 10-year leases, and that affects your refinancing options as much as your cap rate.

Those are the conversations worth having.

The Cat A+ debate is not settled by who can tell the best story, it’s settled by who measures the full economic reality most accurately.

If you want to pressure-test your leasing strategy with a like-for-like financial comparison across the full life of the asset, I’d love to have a chat.

This finance thought leadership article is brought to you by

ReturnSuite’s advisory service handles the financial comparison for complex leasing strategy decisions — every cash flow over the full economic life, normalised into a single defensible number.

Learn how we can help →

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 9

Antony Slumbers has spent more than two decades at the intersection of real estate and technology — first as a software company founder writing property management systems, then as one of the most widely read voices on AI in the built environment.

He runs the Generative AI for Real Estate People course, now on its 50th cohort, and has become a go-to thinker for anyone trying to understand what artificial intelligence actually means for how this industry operates.

This episode is the first of a two-part conversation.

Key Timestamps

• [00:06:30] Antony’s background: 20+ years in PropTech, software businesses, and how he became a leading voice on AI in real estate

• [00:09:00] Why the ‘use cases’ conversation has become almost meaningless — and how generative AI has outgrown the ‘text, code, images’ framing

• [00:09:45] André Karpathy’s ‘kernel of an operating system’ idea and what natural language computing actually means in practice

• [00:11:00] Why cracking Excel changes everything for real estate — and what that means for how analysts actually spend their time

• [00:12:30] The data problem: why most real estate firms’ data is still ‘pretty rubbish’ and why that has to be fixed before AI can do its work

• [00:13:00] Inverting the 70/30 ratio: from 70% wrangling models to 70% thinking about inputs and outcomes

• [00:14:30] Why real estate developers need to pay more attention to technology than almost anyone — the seven-to-ten-year gestation problem

• [00:19:30] From SaaS dashboards to outcomes-as-a-service: where the market is heading and who is already building for it

• [00:21:00] The co-pilot obsession in real estate firms — and why locking people into inferior internal tools creates a governance vs capability tension

• [00:22:00] From engineers writing code to engineers managing agents: how Karpathy went from 80% human/20% machine to the reverse

• [00:23:30] Why JLL, CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield lost 25% of their market cap in two days — and what the market is actually pricing in

• [00:24:00] The structural shift: from human-plus-software to agents-plus-APIs, and what that means for building management

• [00:26:00] Domain expertise as the killer advantage: why the people getting the most out of AI right now are those who already know what wrong looks like

• [00:27:30] The junior talent paradox: cutting graduate intake may look efficient now but hollows out domain knowledge in a decade

• [00:31:00] Bloom’s Two Sigma problem and the prospect of AI as a personal tutor that compresses years of professional development

• [00:35:30] Closing out Part One: the environmental and social paradox of AI that will be the focus of Part Two

Organisations Mentioned

• OpenAI

• Anthropic

• Google DeepMind / Google Gemini

• Tesla

• Salesforce

• JLL

• CBRE

• Cushman & Wakefield

• LaSalle Investment Management

• Hines

• CQuel

• 2150

• UK Green Building Council

• Better Buildings Partnership

• McKinsey & Company

• Knight Frank

• NREP

• GREEN

• Google (NotebookLM)

• Microsoft

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Occupancy is a fools game

Occupancy is one of the most overused and misunderstood metrics in flex.

In Episode 1 of Season 17, sits down with Alex Livesey, Fractional MD at Mantle and CEO of Little Red Donkey, for a sharp and practical conversation about what actually drives performance in flexible workspace.

Joining as co-host is , CEO of Flexspace AI.

Alex brings a rare combination of operating experience across both hospitality and flex office. Many in the industry will know her from senior roles at Clockwise and Native, as well as her time as Managing Director at Brama Hotels.

Today, she is focused on helping flex businesses improve performance, sharpen operations, and build stronger foundations for growth.

In this episode, Alex explains why occupancy can be a fool’s game if the pricing, customer mix, and margin profile are wrong. She argues that too many operators still optimise for optics instead of economics, filling space at the wrong rates, over-relying on large occupiers, or underwriting deals without properly accounting for supply, product mix, and the realities of micro-location.

The conversation also explores one of the central themes of Season 17, how to build a profitable flex business without getting distracted by vanity metrics, lazy occupancy targets, or enterprise deals that look good on paper but create more risk than value.

Alex also shares how her hospitality background shapes the way she thinks about yield management, booking behaviour, utilisation, and ancillary revenue. From meeting rooms and pricing strategy to member mix and long-term retention, this episode offers a clear-eyed look at what better commercial discipline in flex actually looks like.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why occupancy can be one of the most misleading metrics in the flex business

• How pricing quality and margin should shape operational decision-making

• Why supply, product mix, and micro-location need to be built into underwriting

• How revenue quality differs from revenue volume

• Why meeting rooms and ancillary revenue are often under-managed

• What hospitality can teach flex operators about pricing and utilisation

• Why enterprise customers are not always the safest or most profitable customers

• How people, processes, and systems determine whether a flex platform can truly scale

Key Takeaways for Operators

Alex makes the case that operators should stop treating occupancy as the primary signal of success. A full building at weak pricing, poor customer mix, or high acquisition cost can be less profitable than a lower-occupancy building with stronger rates and healthier margins.

She also argues that operators need to get more sophisticated about ancillary revenue and meeting room performance. These products should not be treated as an afterthought. They should be managed with the same commercial discipline as office inventory, including stronger systems, smarter pricing, and a better understanding of demand by day and time.

The episode also highlights the importance of building operational infrastructure properly. If people, processes, and systems are not designed to support growth, the business stays reactive and struggles to scale efficiently.

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

For landlords and investors, this conversation is a reminder that flex underwriting cannot be reduced to a simple breakeven occupancy assumption. Alex explains that pricing power, market supply, suite mix, and location quality all have a direct impact on long-term performance.

She is especially clear on micro-location. A building may look well placed on paper, but still fail commercially if it sits in the wrong part of a district, feels disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem, or lacks the wider placemaking ingredients that today’s occupiers value.

The episode also offers a more sober view of enterprise demand. Large occupiers may look attractive in underwriting decks, but concentration risk, concession packages, and churn can create more downside than many assume. In contrast, diversified smaller occupiers often produce stickier income and a healthier operating environment.

Behind The Scenes

We want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where this episode was recorded, for their brilliant podcast studio and hospitality throughout the season. Tap here to book their podcast studio yourself!

Brave Ideas Season 17

Season 17 of Brave Ideas explores one of the most important questions in office real estate today, how to build a more profitable flex business. Across the season, Caleb Parker speaks with industry leaders about the real commercial drivers behind Space-as-a-Service.