In Episode 5 of Capital Routes: The Jersey Series, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker, sits down with Phil Wood, Founder of Catterson Wood, in Jersey to explore the parallels between Phil’s planned move from luxury residential development into hotels, and the evolution of office real estate.

Phil shares why he is drawn to hotels with existing operating income, and how owning a property alongside an operating business changes his approach to development, funding and investor returns.

The conversation connects that thinking to offices becoming more operational, examining the role of disciplined underwriting, experienced operators and a clear understanding of how the business generates income.

Topics Discussed

• How ongoing operating income changes the proposition for investors accustomed to residential development and a return on sale.

• Stress-testing occupancy, room rates and capital expenditure before committing to an acquisition.

• Bringing operational expertise into design and refurbishment, balancing guest experience with practical requirements behind the scenes.

• Demonstrating improved operating performance before seeking to refinance, with the aim of returning investor capital.

• How investors’ preferences for regular income or a future sale can shape the funding and ownership strategy.

About Catterson Wood

Catterson Wood is a luxury residential developer founded by Phil Wood. The company coordinates and manages the development process, from site identification and acquisition through financing, design, construction, marketing and sales.

Learn more about Catterson Wood

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“Runs itself” is a big promise for a coworking space.

There will always be a room to prepare, a member to welcome, or a problem that needs a thoughtful conversation.

But there is a useful ambition behind the phrase. Someone should be able to join, pay, book a room, and get through the door without your team having to arrange each step separately. When something needs personal attention, it should reach the right person.

You may already have much of this in place: online bookings, recurring payments, a member app. The next step is making those parts work together. That is where a space starts to become more autonomous—not by becoming less personal, but by needing less day-to-day coordination.

Start with a member’s first visit

A standard membership is a good place to begin. Follow it from purchase to arrival, including anything your team does outside the main management system.

The member may need to accept an agreement, pay, receive access, and learn where to go. At each stage, consider what your team’s involvement adds. A conversation about choosing the right plan has a different purpose from copying a payment confirmation into another system. You may want to preserve the first and connect the second.

It helps to agree what “ready” looks like. The agreement and payment are recorded, access is available from the agreed date, and the member has the right arrival information. A welcome email alone cannot tell you that all of this has happened.

The rules behind the membership need to be clear too: the start date, location, access hours, and anything that requires approval. Use those rules as the basis for your setup, rather than asking software to resolve an arrangement your team would normally discuss.

Follow the information all the way through

Take a membership starting next Monday. For this example, the agreement and first payment must be completed before access begins. Your own policy may be different.

The purchase creates or updates a customer record containing the plan, location, start date, and billing details. The other systems need to work from that same information, without a colleague entering it again at each stage.

Once the agreement is accepted and payment succeeds, the membership can be ready to start. If your access connection supports it, the correct location and hours can be arranged for Monday—not immediately, and not whenever someone next checks the account.

This is worth walking through with your provider. Has the access system confirmed that everything is ready, or has it only received a request? What happens if the payment is incomplete? Who hears about a failed access update? Could a repeated purchase notification send another welcome or create a duplicate record?

Ask to see those cases in your actual setup. You are checking how the operation behaves, not just whether two products can connect.

Arrival information should reflect the result. If access is ready, explain how to use it. If it is still being arranged, give the member an accurate update and a way to get help.

Follow the process at the other end as well. A cancellation or plan change needs to reach billing and access at the agreed time. Joining, changing, and leaving are all parts of the same routine.

Make everyday tasks easy to complete

Once that journey works, room bookings and recurring billing are natural places to continue.

For a member, booking should be straightforward: see availability, understand the cost or credit use, and confirm. Put the cancellation rules where they can read them before deciding. Keep invoices and help easy to find in the same member experience.

Behind the scenes, check how changes affect the rest of the process. Does cancelling release the room? Are credits or charges adjusted according to your policy? What happens when there are not enough credits, or two members request the same slot?

Try these cases from a member account. They are useful checks of whether the whole task works without a separate correction by the team.

Recurring billing needs the same distinction between the ordinary and the unusual. Let the agreed plan drive the normal invoice and payment cycle where your tools support it. Bring failed payments and disputes to someone who can review them. A payment reminder and an access restriction are different decisions; keep the latter subject to your policy and appropriate review.

Self-service should give members more freedom, not less support. They can handle familiar tasks when it suits them and still speak to someone when they need to.

Where intelligence helps

So far, much of this is ordinary automation: an agreed rule produces a predictable action. That is often exactly what you need for billing dates, fixed charges, and booking limits.

AI has a different role. It can help interpret a question or bring together information for a useful answer. An assistant might draft an email when you ask. An agent can be configured to begin when an event occurs, check records, and carry out a specific assignment using tools it has permission to access. The available actions depend on your platform and its connections.

Think of operational intelligence as those abilities working together: finding the relevant information, interpreting what is needed, and taking an agreed next step. It builds on the processes you have already put in place.

Spacebring Intelligence brings these capabilities into coworking operations: Spacebring Agent answers questions and takes action when asked, while configured agents carry out assignments on a schedule or when specified events occur.

A welcome message is a simple example. A template may do the job perfectly well. An agent may help when the message needs to reflect the plan, location, language, and whether the purchaser is actually new. An existing member buying another subscription probably does not need first-day instructions again.

Give that task a clear brief. Explain what starts it, which records to check, when to send nothing, and who handles missing details. Make flagging missing access instructions part of the brief rather than letting the agent improvise. Limit its permissions and review test messages before allowing it to act independently.

Support offers another use: routine questions can draw on current guides, while unanswered or sensitive requests go to the team. The handover needs a named recipient and a workable notification—not just a reassuring reply to the member. Facts such as payment status and room availability should come from the systems that hold them.

There is no need to add an agent to every process. Use intelligence where it reduces work that fixed rules cannot handle well.

Keep the building in the picture

The digital side is only part of running a space. Cleaning, room setup, supplies, and maintenance still need people and reliable arrangements.

If a booking requires a special setup, decide how that request reaches the person doing the work and how they confirm it is ready. When the booking changes, the preparation needs to change too. That might happen through a supported connection or a shared schedule—whichever your team can use reliably.

A room fault needs both a repair and an availability update. Agree who handles each and who checks the room before it returns to use. Keep regular checks and cover arrangements for work that does not begin with a member request.

The purpose is not to automate physical work. It is to make the coordination easier, including when colleagues cover for one another.

Make it clear when a person is needed

As more routine work runs independently, your team needs a useful view of what remains unfinished: an agreement awaiting acceptance, access not yet confirmed, a disputed charge, or a question needing an answer.

Give each case a responsible person and agree when it needs further attention. An urgent entry problem needs a different route from a routine invoice query, particularly outside staffed hours. Keep your building’s safety procedures and a way to pause automation and complete a task manually.

Before relying on a new process, test successful and incomplete journeys with staff accounts or controlled recipients. Look at the member’s experience, the records in each system, and the request that reaches the team.

Afterwards, keep a short record of where people step in and why. Repeated arrival questions might suggest a useful addition to the welcome information. Missed updates might point to a connection that needs attention. Other requests may be exactly the kind you want a person to handle.

Start with one membership journey, get it working from beginning to end, and build from there. Measure whether routine tasks finish correctly and how much checking remains, rather than how many automated actions occur.

A more autonomous space should feel easier to use and easier to look after. Members can get on with their day, colleagues know what needs attention, and your team has more room for the conversations and care that make the space worth joining.

An office can be ready for customers long before it is ready to pay investors back.

The latest market reports are useful context for that gap.

JLL’s Q3 Central London research recorded 3.1 million SqFt of take-up, describing it as “the strongest Q3 since 2019”. Active demand increased by 5% over the quarter, while supply tightened for the fourth consecutive quarter.

Meanwhile, Savills’ October investment report describes buyers taking longer over decisions and renegotiating prices as financing costs rise. Prime office yields in London City, the West End and Manchester moved out by 25 basis points during Q3, putting pressure on what buyers will pay for a given income.

Reading those reports alongside our own conversations,
I can understand the hesitation.

In one of our current project conversations, there’s interest from a potential buyer in the completed asset. But funding the development/repositioning is still a separate discussion.

Someone can see a building they’d want to own without wanting to take construction risk.

For a project being underwritten today, stronger demand sits alongside pressure on financing costs and exit values. We have to make the numbers work with both.

Because someone still has to fund the work before the income arrives.

At Brave, our projects include Members Clubs for Lifestyle Working™ and mixed-use destinations combining workplaces, food and beverage and, in some cases, hotels. We’re looking at the property and the businesses planned for it together.

Getting the doors open

In one structure we’ve been discussing, the landlord would fund the building works, while we would bring the working capital needed to get the business up and running.

The landlord needs to know how its investment will earn a return.
Our investors need to know how much cash we’ll need while membership grows.

Both rely on customers choosing the building and staying with us.

Alongside the fit-out, there’s a team to hire, a sales effort to pay for and a service to deliver from the day the first member arrives. And it’s crucial that those early members get the experience they signed up for while we’re still filling the building.

Running short of cash at that stage could undermine the experience we’re selling.

I’ve found that no two deals are the same.
We’ve been discussing different arrangements with owners, including leases, a base rent with a share of the upside, as well as management agreements. Each comes with different responsibilities. So we need to work through what the owners and equity investors are comfortable funding and what the operating business can afford.

I find those conversations are much more useful when everyone can see what the numbers are based on.

Different stages, different investors

The buyer interest I mentioned earlier is in the completed asset.
That leaves us to work through the development or repositioning finance.

I think this helps explain why improving occupier demand doesn’t immediately bring new investment with it. Investors taking construction risk often have a different timeframe and appetite for risk from someone backing the business inside the building.

Sure, different investors can fund those stages. That means we need a workable plan for moving between them, including what a new buyer or lender would need to see before committing.

Giving these businesses time to stabilise costs money. Investors need a return that reflects that commitment and the risk they’re taking.

In their report, Savills puts it plainly: “Income will remain the driver of total returns.”

When revenue comes from memberships, hospitality and other services, we need customers to keep choosing us. That means funding the team and service that give them a reason to return while we build the customer base, with a clear plan for covering those costs and delivering our target return.

My view is that private capital has an opening where it is willing to underwrite that process ahead of institutional investors who want more evidence of operating performance before committing.

Stronger occupier demand gives us a reason to examine these opportunities. For private investors coming in early, the entry price and share of the upside should reflect the risk they’re taking.

I’d want the projected return to hold up under conservative exit assumptions, with allowance for a slower start or higher costs.

The opportunity I see for private investors with a longer horizon is to create assets they’re well paid to hold. That means targeting strong cash-on-cash returns from sustainable operating income, with the option to sell when the timing and price make sense. A proven operating record could widen the pool of potential buyers, including institutions.

In Episode 4 of Capital Routes: The Jersey Series, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker, sits down with Jeff O’Boyle, Partner in the Property team at Appleby, to explore how legal agreements can define risk, reward and responsibility as offices become more operational.

Drawing on his experience in retail and hospitality, Jeff discusses what office investors can learn from turnover rents, management agreements and profit-sharing arrangements.

The conversation examines how those structures can support collaboration between landlords and operators, and what investors need to consider when income depends on the performance of the business within a building.

Topics Discussed

• What retail and hospitality can teach office investors about structuring base rent and variable income.

• How profits from amenities could offset service charges or fund building improvements.

• Why clear definitions of turnover and profit are central to the agreement.

• How to define successful performance through KPIs that can be monitored and audited.

• The role of step-in rights, termination provisions and control over operating assets if an operator fails.

About Appleby

Appleby’s Property team advises on commercial and residential property transactions, including acquisitions and disposals, leasing, development and property finance.

Learn more about Appleby’s Property team

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Furnishing for the next occupier

Furnishing an office before securing an occupier can help bring the space to life. It gives prospective customers something tangible to view and helps them imagine their team working there.

That question ran through NORNORM’s recent workshop at GCUC London.

In a small-group discussion, participants shared experiences of buying furniture ahead of demand, storing items they no longer needed and managing the cost of adapting space.

These were observations from the discussion, rather than a survey of the wider market. Together, however, they highlighted a useful commercial question:

How much flexibility does an operator retain after making the initial furnishing decision?

The furniture decision continues beyond the first fit-out

When furnishing ahead of a letting, operators make assumptions about the next occupier:

• How many desks they will need?

• How they will work and what balance of meeting, collaboration and private space will suit them?

Participants described purchasing furniture for anticipated layouts before those requirements were clear. If an occupier’s needs differ, the operator then has to decide what to retain, replace, move or store.

In some cases discussed, responsibility for sourcing alternative furniture and covering the cost passed to the occupier.

The initial purchase price therefore tells only part of the story.

The practical and financial consequences of changing the setup also deserve attention.

Unused furniture can occupy space that could be earning revenue

Storage was a recurring concern.

Some participants described keeping surplus furniture in available office suites.

That creates a second cost beyond the furniture itself.
A suite used for storage may be harder to present to prospective occupiers and needs to be cleared before it can be occupied.

Furniture bought to make one space marketable can therefore become an obstacle to marketing another.

For operators, this raises a practical question:

When furniture is no longer needed in its current location, is there a clear route for putting it back into use?

Changing requirements can also mean changing the space

The discussion extended beyond desks and chairs.

Participants highlighted rising costs for occupier-specific alterations, particularly internal meeting rooms, with some costs passed on to customers.

There was interest in modular meeting rooms as an option worth exploring. Their suitability will depend on the building and the occupier’s requirements, but the interest reflected a broader concern:

How to accommodate change without treating every new requirement as another substantial fit-out project.

Furniture and layout decisions are closely connected. Both influence how readily an operator can respond when a prospective occupier asks for something different.

Assess the cost of change before committing

A useful starting point is to consider the next change alongside the initial setup:

• What happens to furniture if the next occupier needs a different layout?

• Who manages and pays for moving, storing or replacing it?

• Could surplus furniture affect the availability of another suite?

• Which elements of the workspace can be adapted or reused?

Answering these questions early gives operators a fuller view of the furnishing decision. It also helps them compare options on their ability to support future lettings, alongside their upfront cost.

The takeaway from our GCUC discussion was that furnishing decisions deserve to be assessed over time. Creating an attractive office today matters. So does having a workable plan for when tomorrow’s occupier needs something different.

This Thought Leadership content is brought to you by NORNORM

Planning a new workspace or reviewing an existing setup?
Explore how NORNORM could support your next project.

In Episode 3, I sat down at the L’Horizon Beach Hotel & Spa in Jersey with Martin Johnson, Chief Operating Officer at Empire Global Finance, in Jersey to explore how the capital stack comes together for operational real estate.

Drawing on his experience in banking and finance brokerage, Martin discusses how to match projects with suitable lenders, establish the equity requirement and plan for funding as a building moves from development into stable trading.

Topics Discussed

• How pre-lets and evidence from existing sites can support a funding proposal.

• Matching a project’s location, track record and income mix to lender appetite.

• Working out how much equity is needed, when it goes in and how long it may remain invested.

• The role of stabilisation debt between practical completion and longer-term lending.

• How the cost and availability of debt can change as occupancy and income become established.

About Empire Global Finance

Empire Global Finance is an independent finance brokerage helping clients arrange debt, with services including property development finance, commercial mortgages and bridging finance.

Learn more about Empire Global Finance

Your Brand on Season 2 of Capital Routes™

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It is 8:30 in the morning and the coffee shop is already losing its mind.

The grinder is screaming like it owes someone money.
Milk hisses under the steam wand.
Cups knock against saucers.
A barista no older than twenty-two works a row of drinks with the concentration lines of someone forty years their senior carved into their brow, not once looking up.

Flat white. Oat latte. Two Americanos.
Something iced with enough modifications it needs its own project manager and probably a lawyer

Why is everything matcha something now ?

The queue keeps moving. Nobody in it is thinking about margin.

You reach the till. The screen turns towards you.

£4.20.

You tap your card. That’s it.
No sharp intake of breath.
No polite request for an itemised breakdown.
Nobody gestures at the empty two-top in the corner and argues the place should be cheaper because it’s clearly not at capacity.

You pay four pounds twenty for hot water, milk and some ground-up beans in a paper cup, and then, because you’re already committed, you add a pastry. Whole transaction is over before the milk’s finished sitting on your top lip. You walk out eight quid lighter and, bizarrely, pleased with yourself.

Meanwhile, across town, a flex operator is trying to move a day pass from £25 to £27, and it has become a whole thing.

There have been meetings about this.
Actual meetings, with an agenda, about two pounds.
A spreadsheet has been built and rebuilt.
Someone’s worried about the competitor down the road.
Someone else is convinced the members will riot.

The location team flags that Wednesdays are heaving but Fridays are dead, so maybe the price should just... not really go up, not properly, not yet.

Maybe it goes up gradually. Maybe existing customers get grandfathered in forever. Maybe there’s a launch offer to soften a price rise nobody’s actually announced. Maybe 20 per cent off Mondays and Fridays, because nothing says “confident premium product” like discounting the days nobody wants it anyway.

The barista did none of this. The barista told you the price once, looked you dead in the eye, and moved on to the next order because there were nine people behind you and the milk doesn’t steam itself.

That’s the £4 coffee problem. And I’ve watched flex talk itself into it for years now.

Flex has convinced itself people buy workspace the way an actuary buys life insurance:

Square footage against Wi-Fi speed against what the place down the road is charging, all weighed up on a little mental spreadsheet before anyone commits.

Coffee shops know better.

They know almost nobody buys anything that way, not really, not with the part of the brain that’s actually doing the deciding.

Nobody at that till is pricing the wholesale bean cost or benchmarking the rent per square foot against the unit next door.

They’re buying the smell that hits them at the door.
The noise of the machine.
The ten minutes of nothing between the school run and the first Zoom call.

They’re buying the small, stupid ceremony of someone making a thing specifically for them, right now, with their name half-remembered on the cup.

The coffee’s just the vessel the whole feeling arrives in.

Good cafés know this in their bones even if they’d never say it out loud over a flat white. They stage the value before you’ve paid for it. You see the machine, all chrome and pressure gauges, doing something that looks vaguely like engineering. You watch someone weigh the shot, tamp it, time it, pour the milk into something resembling a fern because apparently that still matters to people. The pastries sit under warm light like they’re auditioning for a gallery. By the time the number hits the screen, the case has already been made. Nobody needed convincing at the till because they’d been convinced the second they walked in.

Flex, by and large, does the opposite.

We take something built out of expensive real estate, commercial-grade fibre, furniture, heating, cleaning, design, insurance and the unglamorous daily labour of people keeping the whole operation from falling over, and we describe it as “a desk for the day.”

We hide the experience. We advertise the inventory.

One desk. One chair. Wi-Fi included.

Then we act baffled when £25 feels like a lot for that.

No restaurant on earth sells dinner as “access to a table for two hours, food included.” No hotel leads with the thread count. The café isn’t selling you temporary custody of a ceramic mug.

But flex, God love it, is still out here selling furniture like it’s the whole pitch.

And when the customer so much as hesitates, we reach straight for the discount, because it’s the easiest lever in the building. It asks nothing of us. You don’t have to sharpen the story, improve the product or explain, with any conviction, why the thing is worth what it costs. You just make the number smaller and hope the silence that follows means relief instead of confirmation that they were right to push.

It works.
Once.

Then the discounted price quietly becomes the real price, the offer that was meant to be temporary calcifies into policy, and the customer who’ll pay £4.20 without blinking for a coffee is on the phone asking if the meeting room rate has “any flex in it,” because we taught them, ourselves, with our own hands, that it probably does.

There’s something almost impressive about how fast this industry folds.

The customer asks for a price.
We hand back the price, a bullet list of everything included, and a discount we invented while typing the email, unprompted, like a hostage negotiator working against himself.

Coffee shops don’t carry this particular crisis of confidence.
They know full well not everyone walking past is going to buy from them, and they get on with the morning anyway. There is, almost always, cheaper coffee somewhere nearby. Sometimes it’s free, sitting in a pot in someone’s office kitchen. The queue doesn’t care. The queue keeps forming.

Price matters, obviously, I’m not naive about this.

There’s a ceiling, and no amount of exposed brick or a hand-drawn chalkboard font is going to turn bad coffee into good coffee, or a miserable meeting room into a nice one. But people aren’t out there hunting relentlessly for the single lowest number on the market. They’re hunting for something that feels worth what it costs. That’s a different hunt entirely, and it’s the one flex keeps losing by accident.

Those are not the same lever, and treating them like they are is how you end up managing a spreadsheet full of concessions instead of a business.

Flex should spend a lot less time asking whether £27 is too much, and a lot more time asking what the customer actually sees in the ninety seconds before they’re asked to pay it.

• Do they see a desk, or somewhere they can finally get a proper day’s work done without three interruptions an hour?

• Do they see a meeting room, or somewhere they can bring a client without silently apologising for the carpet?

• Do they see “Wi-Fi and coffee included” on a feature list, or a day where someone else has already dealt with the heating, the cleaning, the deliveries, the cables, the milk, and the hundred other small irritations of trying to work somewhere that isn’t your own kitchen table?

If the value only lives in our heads, it doesn’t exist.

Full stop.

That’s not cynicism, that’s just how customers work.

Coffee shops have got very good at staging their value, and not in a cynical, smoke-and-mirrors way either. The grinder’s real. The skill’s real. The room genuinely matters to how the coffee tastes, even if nobody could tell you why. Every part of the experience reinforces the price until handing over £4 stops feeling like a financial decision and starts feeling like the obvious, natural end of standing in that queue.

Flex doesn’t need to copy the chalkboards, the hanging plants, or the solemn little paragraph about ethically sourced beans. We have more than enough of that already, thanks.

What it needs is the nerve to understand what it’s actually selling.

Not the desk.
Not the chair.
Not eight hours of building access with a fob code.

That’s worth considerably more than the furniture sitting on the floor.
It’s about time flex started pricing like it believed that.

The £4 coffee isn’t overpriced.

The £25 workspace is just badly explained.

How will they get their money back?

In Episode 2 of Capital Routes: The Jersey Series, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker, sits down with with Neil Spacie, Managing Director of Hawk, in Jersey to explore the questions he would ask before backing an operational real estate project.

Drawing on his lending experience and Hawk’s family office connections, Neil discusses the credibility of the team, the strength of the equity partners and the resilience of the businesses generating income within a building.

Topics Discussed

• How lenders assess experienced teams behind new businesses with limited corporate track records.

• What happens when several income streams within a mixed-use asset fall at the same time.

• Whether equity partners can support a project if performance falls short.

• Why a short-term lender needs to understand who could provide the next stage of funding.

• Whether an asset retains its value when the original management team steps away.

About Hawk

Hawk is a Jersey-based specialist lender backed by family capital, providing short-term, real estate-backed lending.

Learn more about Hawk

Your Brand on Season 2 of Capital Routes™

Reach the people behind the capital by partnering with us.

Explore Partnership Packages

How do those connections translate into real estate opportunities?

In our opening episode, Brave Corp CEO, Caleb Parker, sits down with David Bell of PCD Group in Jersey to explore the people and relationships connecting private wealth with real estate across borders.

David describes Jersey’s role as a centre for structuring wealth and investment, and why tangible assets that generate cash flow appeal to the entrepreneurial clients represented by PCD’s members.

We discuss:

• How advisers and intermediaries connect international investors with opportunities in UK and US real estate.

• Why relationships matter when sourcing deals and finding credible investors.

• What brought the Brave Ideas and PCD Group communities together as office real estate becomes more operational.

• How events and content help professionals build connections across markets.

This opening conversation sets the context for the episodes ahead, featuring perspectives from lenders, finance brokers, developers and lawyers.

Enjoy!

Your Brand on Season 2 of Capital Routes™

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Hospitality, flexible workplaces, food and beverage, and wellness are changing how buildings generate income.

That raises questions about how we finance them, value them and allocate risk.

Welcome to Capital Routes: The Jersey Series,
a Brave Ideas collaboration with PCD Group.

Hosted by Caleb Parker, founder and CEO of Brave Corporation, this new series was recorded in Jersey alongside PCD’s private wealth dinner.

The series brings together lenders, finance brokers, developers, lawyers and private wealth leaders to explore the decisions that determine whether the next generation of office real estate gets funded.

This trailer introduces the conversations ahead, featuring David Bell, Neil Spacie, Martin Johnson, Phil Wood and Jeff O’Boyle.

Across the series, we ask:

• What can debt underwrite?

• Where does equity step in?

• How do you value income that isn’t secured by long leases?

• Who carries the operational risk?

• What must be proven before institutional capital returns?

Our first full episode, featuring David Bell of PCD Group, launches later today, to set the stage for the episodes that follow.

Are you ready?

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Who pays when a flex partnership underperforms?

This question belong in the conversation before the doors open, and deserves an answer before anyone negotiates the profit share.

I shared some early thoughts on landlord-operator partnerships on LinkedIn recently. Thank you to everyone who added their perspective in the comments. I wanted to spend a little more time on the question here, because the agreement we sign will shape the decisions we can make when things get difficult.

Two parties can be enthusiastic about the same building and have very different expectations about what happens when it takes longer to fill.

A recent Coworking Europe interview with The Shire founder Rafał Pisklewicz, published on 15 September brought this into focus:

“Sometimes we’d rather not earn than put the landlord at a loss.”

The Shire reports growing to 12 locations in three years, with more than half its portfolio under management agreements. The interview does not disclose site-level returns.

What interests me is the willingness to discuss whose economics the agreement is designed to protect.

That conversation should go both ways.

The partnership starts in the underwriting

In my previous article, I explored whether overlooked secondary offices could become premium assets through the right repositioning strategy.

Once you identify that opportunity, someone has to fund the transformation and someone has to make the business work.

The landlord and operator may each contribute capital, expertise and relationships in different proportions. Their expectations need to reflect those contributions and the risks they retain.

Take a building that needs a substantial fit-out before the first member arrives. A slower opening affects the amount of working capital required, the timing of distributions and the return on the initial investment.

A building can cover its operating costs while leaving its owner years away from recovering the fit-out spend.

An operator can show a positive site contribution while still needing to fund the central team supporting it.

Both deserve to understand the full picture.

For me, a profit-sharing percentage becomes meaningful once we agree what profit includes, which costs come first and when invested capital is returned.

Pay for the capability you expect

This is where I would be careful with the idea that an operator should only get paid once a landlord makes money.

A premium workplace needs a properly resourced operation.

The team, sales capability, technology, hospitality and management all have to be funded. Expecting an operator to absorb those costs indefinitely can weaken the business responsible for delivering the landlord’s return.

An agreed operating budget and a sustainable management fee can support that capability. Each should come with clear responsibilities and visibility of what is being paid for.

Performance incentives can then be linked to agreed outcomes.

Those outcomes need some thought.

Higher occupancy achieved through heavy discounting may do little for net income. Cutting service costs might improve this quarter’s figures while making renewals harder next year.

I would want the agreement to encourage decisions that protect the quality of the workplace and the income it can sustain.

Each party needs a viable business.

Give the partnership room to respond

A downside forecast is useful when it helps both parties agree how they will respond.

If demand is slower than expected, who can change pricing?
Who approves additional sales spending?
Who funds the shortfall, and how much has each party committed?

There also needs to be a point at which the strategy is reviewed.

Continuing to fund an underperforming location should involve an honest assessment of why it is missing expectations and whether further investment has a credible purpose.

Ending an agreement requires thought too.

Members still need a functioning workplace.
Staffing, systems and service continuity need a practical handover plan.

These decisions become much harder when cash is running short and the two parties are working from different assumptions.

Transparency is part of the partnership

At Brave, this is how we approach underwriting:
making the assumptions, costs and potential returns clear for everyone involved.

We want the operating proposition and the investment case to work together, with enough visibility for each party to understand how a decision affects the other.

That includes being explicit about fees, capital recovery and the consequences of underperformance.

I believe this matters as more office buildings become operating businesses. The quality of the relationship between owner and operator will influence the decisions made inside those buildings.

Before committing to a partnership, I would want to know we could have an honest conversation about a difficult year.

Because we should have that conversation while there is still time to change the agreement.

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Brand, transparency and the decisions facing operators in 2027.

A customer looking for an office can now compare coworking, serviced offices, managed offices and traditional leases within the same search. Landlords introducing their own flex products are adding to that choice and increasing competition.

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For office operators, the challenge is becoming more pressing:

Why should that customer choose you?

That question ran through The Flex Market in Transition, our Brave Ideas event at MUTE’s London showroom on 17 September, presented by BOLTA and MUTE.

With Mark Bott as MC and panels moderated by Jessica Morgan and Zoe Ellis-Moore, the afternoon explored what this convergence means for the businesses providing office space.

Going Deeper on Brand

The discussion repeatedly returned to brand.

1. What does an operator stand for?

2. Who does it serve?

3. How clearly does that identity come through in the experience it delivers?

As products become easier to compare, operators need to give customers a clear reason to identify with their brand. That requires a deeper understanding of their values and audience, expressed consistently through their communications, service and product decisions.

It also means creating content around the ideas and interests that matter to those customers, extending the conversation beyond the offices, desks and meeting rooms available to rent.

Being Found Through AI Search

The discussion around AI engine optimisation, or AEO, brought another dimension to this. Panellists highlighted familiar SEO tactics alongside a greater emphasis on earned media. For operators, that adds weight to how their brand is represented and discussed across publications, podcasts and other sources beyond their own website.

AI and the Human Experience

AI is also changing what happens once a customer makes contact.

Some operators described using AI agents to handle initial enquiries. Others are concentrating on AI as an internal tool for their teams, with concerns about preserving a human experience at the start of the customer relationship.

Those choices deserve to be considered alongside the brand promise.

• Where does speed improve the experience?

• Where does a customer need personal attention?

• How well does the technology support the people delivering the service?

Transparency and Trust

There was broad agreement on the need for market transparency and data customers can trust. The discussion challenged the opacity of information historically gated through brokers.

Transparent pricing across products gives customers a clearer basis for comparison, and gives providers an opportunity to build proposals around their specific requirements.

The Dynamic Pricing Question

Pricing itself prompted a lively debate.

Most contributors saw a role for dynamic pricing in short stays, with more questions about its value for longer commitments. An audience member pointed out that pricing already changes organically as sales teams review occupancy in monthly or quarterly meetings.

That leaves a practical question:

Would an AI pricing tool help those teams make better decisions, particularly for longer stays?

Competing for 2027

The priorities emerging from the afternoon were clear. Go deeper on brand. Communicate the values that attract the customers you want to serve. Make pricing understandable. Use reliable information to deliver a tailored solution.

Competing across a broader market puts every part of that customer journey under greater scrutiny.

For more, watch our recent Friday Five debrief with Jessica Morgan:

Thank you to our MC Mark Bott, moderators Jessica Morgan and Zoe Ellis-Moore, and panellists Jim Groves, Alexandra Livesey, Rob Strachan, Helena Hughes, Sophie Turnbull, Frederick Bailey, Robert Schogger, Michael Dean and Gosia Hermanowicz.

And thank you to BOLTA, MUTE, and everyone who contributed to the conversation.

Explore the photo gallery below and feel free to download and share on social media.

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Every serious conversation comes back to the same question:

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Businesses love metrics.

Revenue per square foot.
Conversion rate.
Average transaction value.
Labour percentage.
NPS.
CSAT.
Utilisation.
Retention.

All useful.
All sensible.
All capable of being discussed for forty-five minutes in a meeting while, downstairs, a customer is standing in front of a door they cannot work out how to open.

That’s the bit I’m interested in.

We’ve become incredibly good at measuring what happened and strangely bad at measuring what it actually felt like while it was happening. We know what people bought, how much they spent, whether they came back, whether they gave us an eight or a nine when we emailed them three hours later asking how likely they were to recommend us to a friend.

Very sophisticated.

What we don’t tend to know is how many times they got confused, hesitated, moved something, needed rescuing by a member of staff or quietly decided they couldn’t be arsed anymore.

Most KPIs are basically autopsies.
They tell you what already happened.
Revenue fell. Conversion dropped.
NPS moved three points. Retention softened.

Fantastic.

By the time the dashboard notices, the customer has already stood outside the wrong door, failed to connect to the Wi-Fi, asked where the toilet is, watched someone manually override the booking system and decided they’ll probably go somewhere else next time.

So I’ve made some new KPIs.
The methodology is robust.
The benchmarks are internationally recognised.

I will not be taking questions.

1. Door Hesitation Index (DHI)

Definition: The average period of visible uncertainty experienced by a first-time visitor attempting to enter your business.

Formula: DHI = Total Entrance Hesitation Seconds ÷ First-Time Arrivals

Benchmark:

Time Rating Under 2 seconds Excellent 2 to 5 seconds Acceptable 5 to 8 seconds Concerning 8+ seconds You’ve built an escape room

You know the moment. They approach the door. Slow down. Look through the glass. Look at the handle. Look for a buzzer. Try one door, then another. Perform that strange little half-step humans make when they know there is a decent chance they are about to look like a dick. Eventually someone inside notices and waves them in.

Businesses spend fortunes designing arrival experiences. Architects discuss sightlines. Brand teams commission signage. Someone selects a lamp that costs more than my first car. Then Dave from procurement stands outside for eleven seconds wondering whether he’s supposed to push, pull, scan, ring, knock or simply believe hard enough.

That eleven seconds is your arrival experience. Not the mood board. Not the render. Not whatever somebody wrote under “sense of arrival” in the design brief.

The confused man at the door. Measure him.

2. Staff Pointing Frequency (SPF)

Definition: The number of times employees are required to physically indicate the location of something a customer should reasonably be able to find themselves.

Formula: SPF = Total Directional Finger Extensions ÷ 100 Customer Visits

Benchmark:

Range Rating 0 to 10 Intuitive environment 10 to 25 Mild dependency 25 to 50 Staff acting as supplementary signage 50+ Heathrow ground crew

“Where are the toilets?” Point. “Where do I collect this?” Point. “Which way are the meeting rooms?” Point. “Where do I check in?” Point.

A little pointing is obviously normal. But if your frontline team spend half the day looking like they’re marshalling a 737, perhaps you don’t have exceptionally helpful staff.

Perhaps your building is fucking confusing.

This is where businesses get themselves into trouble. We see someone compensating for a bad experience and call it great service. “They’re always so helpful.” Wonderful. Why does everyone need so much help?

If your people constantly have to explain the building, navigate the customer journey, decode the process and point people towards basic facilities, they are not adding hospitality. They are patching holes. There is a difference.

3. Apology-to-Transaction Ratio (ATR

)

Definition: The number of customer-facing apologies required to successfully complete ordinary business activity.

Formula: ATR = Customer-Facing Apologies ÷ Completed Transactions × 100

“Sorry, it’s taking a while.” “Sorry, the machine does that sometimes.” “Sorry, you need the other entrance.” “Sorry, the booking hasn’t come through.” “Sorry, I’ll just do it manually.” “Sorry, it’s normally quicker than this.”

The interesting thing is that every one of those transactions can still appear as a success. Payment taken. Booking completed. Customer served. Green tick. From a reporting perspective, everything worked beautifully. Meanwhile your staff are spending their day apologising for the machinery around them.

We should probably stop automatically interpreting that as warmth. There is a point at which hospitality stops being hospitality and becomes damage control delivered with eye contact.

Nice employees are incredibly effective at hiding bad businesses. They smooth over the rough edges, remember names, find workarounds, take the blame, make customers laugh, fix things they didn’t break. Then management looks at the customer score and thinks the operating model is working.

It might not be. You might just employ lovely people who are exhausted from protecting customers from it.

4. Chair Migration Coefficient (CMC)

Definition: The frequency with which customers physically relocate furniture away from its intended position.

Formula: CMC = Customer-Initiated Furniture Relocations ÷ Occupied Seating Sessions

Typical causes:

• Proximity to plug socket

• Avoidance of draught

• Better natural light

• Conversation distance

• Escaping a chair selected primarily because it photographed well

I love this one because the customer gives us data and we physically put the data back where it came from. Customer moves chair. Customer leaves. Employee moves chair back. Next customer arrives, moves chair to exactly the same place. Employee moves it back. Repeat. Day after day, month after month, year after year, and somehow nobody concludes that perhaps the customers know where they want the fucking chair.

We worship design intent long after reality has voted against it. The architect decided that table belongs there. The customer keeps moving it here.

At some point this stops being untidiness. It becomes a referendum. And the architect lost.

If fifty people move the same chair, leave it there. Congratulations, you’ve completed your post-occupancy evaluation.

5. Human Override Rate (HOR)

Definition: The percentage of supposedly automated or self-service journeys requiring intervention from an employee in order to reach completion.

Formula: HOR = Manually Rescued Journeys ÷ Total Automated Journeys × 100

QR code won’t load. “I’ll sort it.” Digital pass hasn’t activated. “I’ll let you through.” Booking confirmation hasn’t arrived. “Give me your name.” App logged them out. “It’s easier if I just do it for you.”

The transaction completes. The system records success. Someone later presents a slide announcing that 94% of customers successfully used the new digital journey.

No they didn’t. Michelle used the digital journey. Fourteen customers used Michelle.

This happens everywhere. We introduce technology to reduce friction, then employ humans to absorb the friction created by the technology, then use the successful transaction data to prove the technology reduced friction.

Beautiful.

If your self-service journey requires a member of staff standing beside it explaining how to self-serve, you haven’t automated anything. You’ve built a more expensive queue. And if your software only works because Sophie stands next to it all day, Sophie is the software. Put that in the transformation deck.

6. The Fuck-It Rate (FIR)

Definition: The proportion of identifiable customer intentions abandoned when the effort required to complete an action exceeds the perceived reward.

Formula: FIR = Friction-Induced Abandonments ÷ Observable Customer Intentions × 100

This is the metric I actually want.

Customer wants another drink. Scan QR code. Page loads. Create account. Enter email. Confirm email. Create password. Add card.

Fuck it.

Customer wants to park. Download app.

Fuck it.

Customer wants to change a booking. Chatbot appears.

Fuck it.

Customer wants to buy something. Website says “Get in touch to learn more.”

Fuck it.

Customer wants to pay you money. You have somehow made that their administrative problem.

Fuck it.

These customers are fantastic for your KPIs. They don’t complain, don’t raise a ticket, don’t ask for the manager, don’t write the angry email, don’t damage your NPS. They simply leave. Quietly. Politely. With their money.

Most businesses obsess over the customers who convert and the customers who complain. I’m more interested in the enormous group in the middle who wanted something, encountered one unnecessary piece of bullshit and decided life was too short. You probably don’t know who they are. That’s precisely the problem.

7. Workaround Proliferation Score (WPS)

Definition: The concentration of unofficial employee-created solutions required to make official processes function in the real world.

Formula: WPS = Active Unofficial Workarounds ÷ Official Operating Processes

Recognised workaround categories include:

• The spreadsheet everybody uses but nobody mentions

• The WhatsApp group doing the job the expensive platform was supposed to do

• The handwritten sign

• The bit of tape showing where something belongs

• The door permanently wedged open

• The unofficial shortcut everyone knows

• The laminated instruction reading: PRESS GREEN BUTTON TWICE

Every workaround is evidence. At some point, the official version of reality met the actual version. The actual version won.

Businesses tend to hate workarounds because they look messy, inconsistent, uncontrolled, unapproved. Someone from head office walks in, notices the handwritten sign and says: “Can we take that down? It doesn’t look very professional.”

Maybe. But before you take it down, ask why it exists. Sarah did not wake up on Tuesday morning with a lifelong ambition to laminate an unauthorised instruction. Sarah got asked the same question thirty times. Sarah found a solution. Sarah has probably understood the failure more clearly than the person who owns the process.

There is something deeply funny about a business spending £80,000 on a system, £20,000 implementing it, three months training people on it and another £10,000 producing reporting from it, while the operation is actually being held together by Sarah, masking tape and an Excel file called FINAL_v7_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx.

That’s not an exception. That’s your operating model.

None of these KPIs are real. Yet.

But I’d argue they capture something most of the real ones don’t.

Your normal KPI pack tells you what survived the journey: the customer who successfully entered, the transaction that completed, the booking that made it through, the complaint that was submitted, the customer who stayed long enough to be surveyed. It’s survivor bias with conditional formatting.

Everything that happened before those outcomes barely exists. The person who hesitated. The person who had to ask. The person who moved the chair. The staff member who quietly fixed the system again. The customer who thought about spending £20 and decided it wasn’t worth creating another fucking account. The employee who built their own spreadsheet because your official process was making everybody’s life harder.

Those behaviours aren’t noise around the customer experience. They are the customer experience.

And that’s the uncomfortable bit. We’ve spent years convincing ourselves that more data means more understanding. It doesn’t. You can know precisely how many people entered a building yesterday and have absolutely no idea what it was like to enter it. You can know your conversion rate to two decimal places and still have no clue how many people tried to buy and gave up. You can have an NPS of 72 while your best employees quietly perform operational CPR all day. You can produce a beautiful dashboard proving the business is working while somebody downstairs has stuck a Post-it note over the official instructions because the official instructions are wrong.

Dashboards are useful. But they’re also comforting. They turn messy human behaviour into numbers we can control, into a meeting, a target, a RAG status, an action someone can own. Nobody has to stand downstairs for an hour and watch actual people struggle with the thing we built.

Which might be the metric we’re missing most: how often do the people making decisions actually watch customers use the business? No survey. No dashboard. No report. Just stand there. Watch the door. Watch where people hesitate. Listen for the apologies. Notice what they move. Count how often your “seamless” system gets rescued. Find the handwritten signs. Ask what the weird spreadsheet does. Follow the customer who mutters “fuck it” and leaves.

Because the data is already there.
It just isn’t in Power BI.

And frankly, if your KPI pack says everything is green while Sarah is holding the place together with masking tape and a laminated sign, your KPIs are shit.

Manchester does not go quietly to bed.

On the corner of Oxford Street and Portland Street, McDonald’s has spent decades feeding whatever the city sends through its doors. Buses grind past the windows. The air inside is thick with hot oil, salt, wet pavement and Coca-Cola syrup. Order numbers are shouted into the noise as the next crowd pushes in behind the last.

In my student days, you did not exactly decide to go there.
You ended up there.

It was the final staging post between the night you had planned and the morning you were now going to have.

It has a doorman.
Is that just a UK thing?

It is loud, brightly lit and mostly unlovely.

It may also understand hospitality better than half the luxury hotels we keep trying to imitate.

Order a Coca-Cola.

It arrives in a waxed paper cup with a plastic lid, packed with ice and sweating gently onto the tray. Push the straw through the cross in the top and take a drink.

It tastes exactly like McDonald’s Coke.

Not good Coke. Not bad Coke. McDonald’s Coke.

It is colder, sharper and somehow more aggressive than the stuff that comes out of a bottle at home. Even people who rarely drink it seem to know this. There are articles, Reddit threads and half-serious theories devoted to why it tastes better beneath the Golden Arches.

The answer is disappointingly practical.

McDonald’s filters the water. It pre-chills both the water and the Coca-Cola syrup before they enter the dispenser. The fountain system is kept cold, and the mixture is calibrated to account for the ice that will eventually melt into the drink.

Then there is the straw.

It is slightly wider than a typical straw, allowing more Coke to hit your taste buds with each sip.

Somebody actually thought about the diameter of the straw.

Not the colour.
Not whether it looked premium.
Not whether a customer might photograph it and tag the brand.
Somebody considered what would happen inside your mouth when you took a drink and altered a piece of disposable plastic accordingly.

You were never supposed to notice.

There is no little card beside the dispenser explaining the filtered water. The person behind the counter does not tell you that the syrup was pre-chilled for your enjoyment. Nobody points out the engineering of the straw as they place it on the tray.

You drink the Coke and think it tastes good.

That is the whole transaction.

McDonald’s is an odd place to look for lessons in hospitality.

It has none of the usual credentials. There is no concierge, no maître d’, no lobby scented with cedarwood and bergamot. Nobody is going to remember which side of the bed you prefer or arrange for your favourite bottle of wine to be waiting when you arrive.

There is usually at least one machine making an unpleasant beeping sound.

And yet, behind that counter, an extraordinary amount of thought has gone into ensuring that you receive the Coke you expected.

Flex offices rarely talk about this kind of hospitality.

We prefer hotels. The expensive ones, naturally. We pass around stories about unreasonable hospitality, handwritten notes and extravagant gestures. We visit private members’ clubs, take photographs of the furniture and return convinced that the answer is softer lighting and better soap.

There is nothing wrong with any of that.
A beautiful room can make people feel good.
A thoughtful gesture can rescue a miserable day.

But those are the visible parts. They are also the easiest parts to copy.

The harder work is deciding what the Coke should taste like, then building an operation capable of making it taste that way thousands of times a day.

The five minute fry

McDonald’s applies the same cold logic to its fries.

Cooked fries should only be held for up to five minutes. After that, they may still be warm. They are almost certainly still edible. A hungry person would probably eat them without complaint.

But they are no longer the fries McDonald’s intended to sell.

That is a more demanding standard than it first appears. It does not ask whether the product can still be handed over. It asks whether the product is still right.

Flex office hands over a lot of five-minute-old fries.

The meeting room is available, although the table is still carrying the rings from yesterday’s coffee cups. The screen works, provided somebody knows which loose cable to wiggle. The day office is ready, if ready means there is a desk inside it. The enquiry has been answered, although it spent two days ageing gently in a shared inbox first.

Nothing is completely broken. Everything is technically usable. The customer gets what they bought, more or less.

We have become very comfortable with more or less.

Weighing the bag

McDonald’s is now going further.

Across thousands of restaurants, it has introduced scales that weigh outgoing orders. The system knows roughly what the completed order should weigh. If the bag is too light, it warns the team that something may be missing.

There is something wonderfully blunt about that.

The business does not wait for a customer to arrive home, open the bag and discover the absent fries. It does not email them the following morning asking how likely they are to recommend the collection experience.

It weighs the bag.

The mistake is still allowed to happen. Human beings are involved, so mistakes always will. The clever part is that McDonald’s has built the failure into the operation and placed a tripwire before it reaches the customer.

Most flex businesses install the tripwire afterwards.

It is called a complaint.

Hospitality without the hero

This is where our view of hospitality has become confused.

We treat it as a quality possessed by particularly warm people. Hire somebody friendly, give them permission to perform the occasional small miracle and hope they are working when something goes wrong.

When they are, the business feels wonderful.
They remember the member’s name, find the missing adapter, rearrange the room and somehow get lunch delivered before the meeting starts.

When they leave, much of the hospitality leaves with them.

McDonald’s does not depend on every employee being a magician. Somewhere, at this exact moment, an exhausted eighteen-year-old is halfway through a Saturday night shift, surrounded by delivery orders and machinery that will not stop beeping. The Coke still has to taste like McDonald’s Coke.

The water is filtered whether the manager is charming or not. The syrup is cold on a bad shift. The straw remains the same width when the restaurant is busy.

That is the real achievement.

McDonald’s has built an operation in which an eighteen-year-old on their first week can deliver a more consistent product than many businesses manage with experienced teams, lengthy service manuals and three layers of management.

That is not soulless standardisation.
It is respect for the customer’s time, money and expectations.

Real hospitality is often invisible.

It happens before anybody walks through the door.

It lives in holding times, temperature controls, correctly weighted bags and a fractionally wider straw.

The customer does not need to see the effort.
They should not have to.

They should simply take a drink and know it tastes right.

Perhaps flex office does not need another lesson from a five-star hotel.

Perhaps it needs to spend a little more time beneath the fluorescent lights, listening to the fryers beep, thinking about the straw.

Consumer personalisation is largely driven by repeated behavioural signals. Look at Spotify - it “guesses” your mood from your recent songs and rolls into the next track. Based on your watching habits, Netflix suggests a film you’ll enjoy that you never even knew existed. The clever part of this isn’t the recommendation. It’s how little of it depends on you telling it anything.

But decisions and purchases in business, like finding a new workspace, do not work that way. A company might only take an office every three to five years. There’s no behavioural history to look at because there’s no behaviour to go on. Just one decision to make under conditions that will have certainly changed since the last one.

So personalisation in workspace sourcing must ask questions.
And most importantly: which questions you ask, and in what order.

“But I have an enquiry form!”

Most workspace enquiry forms will collect three data points:
how many desks, location and how long for.

Pretty reasonable.
But also close to useless for working out how well a space will suit.

Take two identical briefs landing in your inbox:
fifteen desks, Zone 1, rolling contract.

One is a legal practice.
That team needs rooms where confidential calls don’t happen behind glass, and a reception that reads as serious to visiting clients, and probably a floor they don’t share with a gym.

The other is a product design studio, which needs wall space it’s allowed to ruin.

Same form, same three fields, completely different outcomes.

What good brokers do

I’ve watched what numerous experienced brokers do with a brief. And maybe no surprise; they rarely start with desk count.

They will ask what the fifteen is based on.
Is it a ceiling or an aspiration.
Who’s signing off.
What didn’t work for them in their last space.
Do clients ever visit, and what the firm wants them to think when they walk in.

None of that is what the enquirer tapped into the form.
But it was made a part of the conversation because the broker has had this conversation two hundred times before and knows which threads to pull.

The order also matters just as much as content:
Ask about growth before term and you tend to get a fuller brief;
Ask term first and the conversation narrows before it’s begun.
Ask about budget first and you’ve capped the conversation before you understand it.

Very little of this is written down anywhere, and brokers don’t always find it easy to explain how they do it.

But two things are working at once here:

1. Guided asking: where different occupier types need different questions and experience tells you which.

2. Inference from outcome: where firms of a certain profile have consistently needed something they didn’t specify, so you raise it before they do.

Ask the structured questions without the pattern knowledge behind them and all you’ve done is make the form longer.

Enter the AI era

Software can hold these patterns at a volume no individual can match.
That’s a strong argument for AI.

A model with enough structured briefs and outcomes can learn which questions predict “fit” for which occupier type. Dependent on the occupier, this might be optimised for shortlist acceptance, viewings booked, deal completion, satisfaction or likelihood of renewal or contract extension.

But the all-too-common “AI-powered personalisation” is doing a lot of unexamined work in marketing copy.

An interesting benchmark called Know Me, Respond to Me examined how models use changing user information across simulated interaction histories. Frontier models recalled user facts reasonably well (60–70%), yet performed considerably worse when incorporating a user’s current situation into their responses (30–50%). The benchmark did not test workplace sourcing, so its findings cannot be applied directly to this market. They do, however, demonstrate the limitations of relying on loose context to produce reliable personalisation.

And the uncomfortable one.

Researchers at MIT and Penn State found that interaction context increased agreeableness in four of the five LLMs they studied, with condensed user profiles producing the largest effect.

Anyone using these tools today has hit the “You’re absolutely right” moment. Which is a problem here, because a system that agrees with the brief will never surface the requirement the occupier didn’t state, and the value of a good broker is that at some point they say, gently, that what you’ve asked for isn’t what you need.

Relationships aren’t data collection, as any experienced agent will tell you.

Trust, reading a room, knowing what a pause means; none of that goes in a form. And even if it could, I’m not suggesting it does. What I’m describing sits alongside the relationship: pattern knowledge that used to live in one head, made available earlier, so conversations can start from a better place.

Why this goes against how much of this market is being built

The flex and managed sector has spent a decade solving supply:
more operators, a wider spread of buildings and product types, and better listing data (sometimes) than we’ve ever had before. The assumption underneath all of this is that more options produce better outcomes for occupiers.

I don’t think that’s right.
A vague brief doesn’t sharpen against a bigger database.
It just misses more times.

Filters scale with the market. They don’t get smarter as it grows.

That’s the structural problem with competing on database breadth.
Adding another filter field hands the work back to the occupier at exactly the moment their decision got harder.

Scarcity has moved.

The hard part now is knowing which questions cut the list down before anyone opens a floorplan.

My bet is that the centre of gravity will move.

For many years the advantage has belonged to whoever held the biggest list. Increasingly I think it belongs to whoever asks the best questions. The growth in supply is driving that, not slowing it down.

Your enquiry form was never going to tell you whether a space is right for a client. That work is happening somewhere else, in conversations you don’t see.

I keep coming back to one question…

How many secondary offices are really prime assets trapped inside an obsolete product?

European office take-up fell 6% during the first half of 2026 and remains 3% below the five-year average, according to Savills’ latest European Office Leasing report.

But the detail beneath that headline is more interesting.

Average office vacancy across Europe is 9.4%.
Prime CBD vacancy is approximately 2%.

Prime rents increased by 3.7% over the past year.

Since 2019, average prime rents have increased by 27%.
Secondary CBD rents have grown by 9%.

Demand has become selective.

Companies still want offices.
They just have higher expectations around location, quality, sustainability and the experience their people have when they get there.

The quality gap is visible across the UK

The regional data tells a similar story.

JLL reported overall vacancy of 10.9% in Manchester during Q2 2026.
New-build vacancy was only 1.2%, its lowest level since 2020.

Prime rents increased from £45 to £48 per SqFt during the quarter.

JLL recorded Grade A vacancy of 2.7% in Edinburgh, 2.1% in Leeds and 1.9% in Glasgow.

There is plenty of office space still available.
But supply of offices companies actively want is much tighter.

That creates interesting questions for investors:

1. Do you buy the prime building at a price that reflects its success?

2. Or do you acquire the overlooked building and create the product the market is demanding?

Can you create prime?

We tend to treat prime and secondary as permanent labels.

But buildings evolve.
And so should the expectations placed on them.

This creates the potential for repositioning.

One finding in the recent Savills research stood out to me.

Using a self-financed, 12-month refurbishment model that includes the rent forgone during the work, Savills estimates that the payback period for turning a secondary City of London office into a prime product has fallen from ten years to five.

Savills also reports that prime rents in the City of London have increased by 49% since 2019, while secondary rents have fallen by 19%.

They describe this as evidence of a more visible “brown discount”.

The market is penalising buildings that have failed to keep pace.

Of course, each building still needs to work on its own merits.

The location needs to support demand.
The structure and floorplates need to be viable.
The acquisition price, CapEx, financing costs and achievable revenue absolutely need to leave enough room for a return.

Manchester also has 1.07 million SqFt under construction, all of it speculative. Today’s shortage of new space may change as that pipeline completes.

City-wide statistics can point us in a direction.
But they cannot replace asset-level underwriting.

Flexibility is becoming part of premium

The premium office also needs to respond to how companies are making decisions.

JLL’s Future of Work research surveyed 2,200 executives and corporate real estate leaders across 21 countries.

It found that 78% expect AI to affect their portfolio strategy significantly during the next three to five years. Only 15% are actively transforming their operations today.

Some 40% identified uncertainty about AI’s impact on their space requirements as a portfolio risk.

JLL also found that innovation-intensive businesses are moving towards planning horizons of 12 to 24 months. Many property decisions continue to rely on assumptions extending seven to ten years.

Businesses need room to adapt as their headcount, attendance patterns and operating models change.

Savills found that flexible offices still account for only 3% of European office take-up, unchanged from last year.

That 3% raises a question.

If businesses need greater flexibility, prime space is scarce and plug-and-play demand is growing, why has flex remained such a small part of measured take-up?

It could reflect the way flex transactions are recorded.
It could also point to limitations in the products, locations and operating models currently available.

The data cannot answer that yet.

A better product needs a better operating model

Premium is often discussed through the lens of specification.

I believe the definition is expanding.

A premium workplace should provide flexibility around how people commit to and use space.

It should make people feel looked after.
It should create reasons for people to connect, collaborate and return.
It should have an identity capable of changing how the market perceives the building.

That requires more than a refurbishment.

It requires Design-led Space, Technology, Community, Hospitality, Management and Brand working together as one operating proposition.

This is what I call the Full-Stack Office.

It is also the thinking behind Brave Corp’s Members Clubs for Lifestyle Working™.

We are building a model for acquiring and repositioning existing buildings around the way people want to work and companies need to operate today.

The Savills and JLL data do not prove that hospitality, amenities or brand caused the rental growth recorded across prime offices.

But they show us where demand is concentrating.

Our thesis is that a Full-Stack Office strategy can help the right secondary asset compete for that demand.

Some secondary buildings will always remain secondary.
Their location, structure or economics will limit what can realistically be achieved.

Others may be suffering from an outdated product and operating model.

Our question remains:
How many overlooked office buildings are waiting for someone to create the next generation of prime?

Ask any coworking operator for their numbers, and you’ll get occupancy, churn, and revenue per desk in about ninety seconds. Ask them how many people walked into their space last month who weren’t members, and most will guess. A few will check a paper log at reception. Almost none will have the number sitting on a dashboard next to the rest.

That gap has started to bother me.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at visitor data across coworking spaces, not membership data, the other kind. The people who show up because a member invited them, or because they’re touring the space, or because there’s an event on downstairs. It’s a category most operational reporting quietly ignores, on the assumption that if someone isn’t paying for a membership, they don’t belong in the numbers that matter.

I think that assumption is wrong.
And I think it’s wrong in a way that reaches further than front-desk efficiency.

The lobby is a market research report nobody’s reading

Here’s roughly what a few years of anonymised visitor activity across coworking locations shows.

• Around two in three recorded visitor arrivals relate to guests brought in by an existing member: a client, a collaborator, someone interviewing for a job.

• The rest is split across tour prospects, event attendees, and recurring service visits, like contractors and deliveries.

That’s internal data from Spacebring, the coworking platform I work with, not a market-wide survey, but consistent across the portfolio of spaces I see.

On it, the average space logs somewhere around 20 visitor arrivals a month, with the busiest running past 200. A meaningful share of all visitors come back to the same space more than once, and the ones who do rarely stop at twice.

Sit with that for a second.

Depending on the location, that’s dozens or hundreds of visitor arrivals a month at a flex space, and almost none of it shows up in the metric that’s supposed to describe how the space is performing.

They’re not in occupancy.
They’re not in churn.

At best, they’re a rounding error in an internal spreadsheet nobody outside the building ever sees.

It isn’t just an internal blind spot, either.

A 2018 Proxyclick survey of 2,000 US and UK office workers found that 40% said their opinion of a company had been shaped, negatively, by a bad experience in the lobby or at reception, most often down to indifferent staff.

It’s an old number, and tellingly, still the one the industry keeps citing.
The industry already accepts that a visitor’s few minutes at the front desk affects how a brand is perceived.

What it hasn’t caught up to is the other half of that same equation:
almost nobody is tracking who those people are, or what they’re worth, once they walk back out the door.

Why this is a finance question, not just an operations one

Flex real estate gets underwritten on the assumption that demand shows up as a signed membership or a booked desk.

But demand shows up earlier than that.

It shows up as a prospect who tours the same space three times before signing anything. It shows up as someone who starts working from the lounge on their own initiative, twice a week, because a friend’s membership got them through the door once, and the space did the rest of the convincing.

None of that is noise.
It’s the earliest, cheapest signal you’ll get that a location is actually working, arguably a more honest signal than occupancy, because nobody has to sign a contract to generate it. A person who walks in unprompted and then keeps coming back on their own initiative is telling you something true about the building and the neighbourhood that a membership agreement never will.

If you’re an operator reporting up to a landlord, or a landlord trying to underwrite the next flex deal in a building you own, that’s a data point worth having on the table.

It’s a leading indicator sitting a few feet from reception, going uncaptured, in an asset class where everyone claims to be starving for leading indicators.

What actually changes if you track it

I’m not arguing for more admin. If anything, the opposite.

The operators handling this well aren’t doing extra paperwork; they’ve simply stopped treating the visitor log as disposable. A visit gets recorded the same way a booking does. A repeat visitor gets flagged the same way an at-risk member does. Nobody’s job description changes. What changes is that a whole category of demand that used to evaporate at the door now shows up somewhere.

The commercial upside is straightforward enough on its own.
A visitor who’s shown up a dozen times is a warmer prospect than almost any lead you’ll generate through paid channels this quarter, and the natural next step, a day pass, then a part-time plan, then membership, tends to follow how they already use the space rather than requiring a hard pitch.

But the upside I find more interesting is what it does to the conversation between operators and the people financing them. “Our visitor-to-member conversion improved this quarter” is a sentence that belongs in an investment update.

Right now, almost nobody can say it, because almost nobody is measuring it.

The question worth asking at the next portfolio review

Every flex operator I know can tell you their occupancy down to the desk. Very few can tell you how many people walked through their door last month who weren’t members yet, or how many of those people came back. That’s an important oversight. It’s a signal about future demand sitting in plain sight, and most of the industry is stepping over it on the way to the reception desk.

If you’re a landlord backing a flex operator, or an operator reporting to one, it might be worth asking for that number at the next review. You may not love what it tells you about how much demand has been going unmeasured under your own roof.

That’s usually the sign you’ve found something worth paying attention to.

Walk into a beautifully designed hotel and you notice the interiors. Walk into a great restaurant and you notice the atmosphere. Step into a premium office and you admire the architecture.

But when you leave, those probably aren’t the things you remember most.

It’s likely you remember how you were greeted, or whether someone anticipated your needs without you having to ask. Or perhaps how easy it was to navigate the space.

I’ve come to realise that whilst buildings create first impressions, experiences create everlasting ones.

Working in commercial property has reinforced something that I think applies just as much to hospitality as it does to offices: every interaction shapes a brand, from start to end.

The website.
The booking process and system.
The arrival and greeting.
The reception.
The signage.
The wayfinding.
The speed of a response.
The tone of an email.
The warmth of a conversation.

Together, these small moments become the brand.

It’s made me think differently about the role of marketing.

The strongest marketing teams help shape the experience people have once they arrive.

That’s where customer experience, employer brand, internal communications, service design and brand strategy begin to overlap.

They’re different ways of designing how people feel.

Some of the world’s most admired hospitality brands understand this instinctively. Some of my favourite examples; Soho House, The Hoxton, and Gordon Ramsey Restaurants… (just to name a few!)

The secret behind building a memorable brand is choreographing lots of small details, with intention, frequently and consistently, to the point where guests don’t think twice about coming back.

I think commercial property has a lot to learn from hospitality.

As offices continue evolving into destinations that people choose to spend their time in rather than places they have to be in, the line between workplace experience and guest experience is becoming blurry.

Perhaps the future isn’t about solely about designing better buildings. It’s about designing better experiences.

Because people will probably remember a space.
But they’ll definitely remember how that space made them feel.

In our industry, it’s easy to talk about desks, amenities and square footage. But the reality is that what we provide is so much more than that. Workspace, at its best, is an extension of a business’s ability to survive and thrive.

At Mantle, and particularly at The Bradfield Centre, we work with technology and innovation-led companies. These are businesses that are very used to operating with uncertainty. The startup world is pretty much defined by it. While startup success rates vary significantly by sector, setting and market conditions, uncertainty and volatility are absolute defining features of many early-stage businesses.

And in that context, workspace can’t be passive. It has to actively support businesses through the moments that matter – the ups and the downs.

The real job is not just providing space when things are going well, but helping businesses navigate periods of change, pressure and uncertainty.

Rethinking space

There’s another fundamental shift underway that workspace providers need to acknowledge too. We’re seeing a wealth of new approaches to growth. Advances in AI and automation are allowing some businesses to achieve more without expanding teams at the same rate as startups used to. While experiences differ, we see how it’s prompting a number of operators to rethink assumptions about how workspace is used.

The role of the environment is evolving. It needs to become more community-driven and experiential, working harder to bring people together at a time when working from home is a viable option for many knowledge workers.

At the same time, the competition for top talent hasn’t gone away. If anything, in tougher markets it becomes even more pronounced.

Workspace therefore plays two roles:

1. Supporting how businesses operate

2. Attracting and retaining the people they need to grow

And so, it forces us to ask the questions:
If space is no longer the primary requirement, what is?
What is the real job of workspace today?

The answer lies in value beyond the physical footprint.
Flexibility isn’t about how many desks a business can take, but how effectively a workspace can respond to changing needs.

When times are tough, businesses become more selective about every cost and every relationship. That means workspace needs to justify its place within that equation.

The operators that will remain relevant are those that understand their role more broadly: participants in their members’ progress.

That means recognising that the real job of workspace often begins when a business encounters a challenge.

Support has to be proactive, not reactive

When businesses are under strain, the last thing they need is another relationship they have to manage. The role of an operator is not to wait for signals, but to understand them early on and check in regularly.

We’ve found that proactive support is most effective when it’s built into the day-to-day and not just reserved for moments of crisis. That means regular member check-ins, conversations with leadership teams, monitoring changes in space usage, understanding recruitment activity and keeping in the know when it comes to funding milestones, strategic changes and growth plans. All of these things really help identify changing needs before they become urgent problems.

It’s not unusual for us to see challenges coming before they reach a tipping point, which allows us to respond meaningfully.

It’s this responsiveness that becomes one of the most valuable things about the workspace itself. The lesson for operators is that support doesn’t always need a new programme or service. Mostly, it’s about spotting issues early and helping members access the right people and resources at the right time.

Community is important – but we have to take it a step further

When capital is restricted and growth is harder to sustain, just having proximity to other businesses can only go so far.

What companies actually need is access – access to investors, expertise and networks they wouldn’t otherwise reach. At The Bradfield Centre, this can include introductions to investors, ecosystem partners such as Barclays Eagle Labs, professional advisers and other more experienced founders.

In a climate where funding is harder to secure and competition for capital is intense, those connections can make a meaningful difference.

The broader lesson here is that community can really be measured by the quality of connections and support available when businesses face challenges.

This is the real role of workspace we talked about:
helping businesses overcome obstacles, not just providing them with space.

Stability looks different for startups

In some sectors, stability is often the goal, but for startups, that’s rarely the case. Growth, contraction and pivot after pivot – these are all part of the normal startup cycle.

So, of course, the consistency of support is more important than consistency of business circumstance.

Workspace operators need to be comfortable with that fluidity.
Your support won’t work for members if it’s based on fixed solutions.
Your offering needs to adapt alongside the business.

That adaptability might mean helping a business scale into larger space, providing access to specialist expertise, or adjusting community programming to reflect changing priorities among your members.

The important point is that businesses change over time, and the workspace offer has to change with them.

Knowledge-sharing isn’t an add-on

One of the most effective ways to support businesses under pressure is to help them stay informed and connected to what’s changing in the world around them.

At The Bradfield Centre, events and knowledge-sharing activities are an important part of how we support members. In recent months, we have hosted a large number of events focused on AI and emerging technologies. This was to meet the growing interest from our community.

This focus isn’t accidental.
In fast-moving sectors such as AI, access to emerging trends, expert insights and peer discussion can help businesses make better-informed decisions during uncertain periods.

Knowledge-sharing is a practical way of helping members respond to a changing market. It creates opportunities for learning, collaboration and problem-solving at a time when businesses across the wider community are all facing similar challenges.

Supporting international ambition

Of course, economic pressure isn’t the same across markets. For some businesses, growth means looking beyond their home market, and the UK continues to be an attractive destination for innovation-led companies.

At Mantle, programmes such as Launch Cambridge have highlighted the range of practical challenges international businesses face when entering a new market. These include things like establishing bank accounts, understanding local regulations, recruiting talent and integrating into the local ecosystem.

Providing support through these transitions is another example of how workspace operators can add value during periods of uncertainty and change.

Ultimately, difficult conditions strip business back to basics, and workspace is no exception.

That is why the real job of collaborative workspace starts when things go wrong.