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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

7 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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🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

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

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.

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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

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Now securing sponsors and advertisers for Season 2

Get In Touch To Sponsor

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

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.

In this new Brave Ideas category, we explore the habits, behaviours and leadership choices that shape stronger teams, better performance and healthier workplace communities. In her first contribution, looks at how small, sustainable health habits can improve resilience, focus and energy, and why that matters not just for people, but for profit too.

When it comes to leadership, energy and resilience matter more than time. Time does not mean much if your brain fogs in the middle of a big meeting or your focus slips because you are running on empty. Many leaders operate at a relentless pace, but few stop to consider how everyday habits quietly drive or drain their ability to perform and lead with clarity.

The good news is, it doesn’t take long‑haul wellness programmes or strict diets to see big results. In fact, those are often unsustainable, not always backed by strong evidence, and can drain mental energy even more.

These habits do not make Instagram headlines, but they make leaders more reliable and help safeguard profit. They build clearer thinking, steadier energy and the ability to show up strong, day after day.

Unhealthy diets make employees 66% more likely to report productivity loss [HERO Study: Mills, P. R., et al. (2012)]

Additionally, employees are thought to lose around 1 day per week of productive time as a result of mental and physical health issues (Vitality Britain’s Healthiest Workplace, 2024). This is the overlooked performance and business profit link when it comes to people management, wellbeing strategies and creating a truly healthy working community.

To add another angle, what we eat has a huge impact on the planet as well as our health, and forms an important part of ESG for businesses. Our food systems contribute to around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems). We also see that shifting our diets to a more planet-friendly way of eating could prevent approximately 15 million premature deaths per year primarily from reduced heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and certain cancers (Gu, X. et al. (2024)).

These contributions from Vanessa will focus on how you as leaders and teams can make these shifts for better performance, retention, productivity, ESG goals and stronger community.

Why habits are a business issue

Habits are not just a personal choice, they are a business advantage. When people make small, healthy decisions consistently, organisations see fewer sick days, sharper thinking and stronger collaboration. The 2024 Vitality Britain’s Healthiest Workplace report found that poor lifestyle habits cost UK businesses £138 billion annually, mostly from preventable illness and fatigue.

This also builds engagement and stronger workplace culture. Healthy habits stick when teams encourage each other. After a talk I gave for the organisation, GS1 UK, their people kept sharing habit ideas long after, and the session ran even more interactively than usual, letting everyone explore quick wins firsthand.

Research shows that well‑planned workplace health programmes can significantly cut absenteeism and boost productivity (Tarro L et al., 2020, PMC7142489). The trick is making health realistic and relevant to how people actually work. When workplaces make positive choices convenient, they help their teams build energy and focus without extra pressure.

What the data shows

Healthy eating is not fluffy wellbeing talk, it is a performance lever with hard numbers behind it. A large workplace‑health survey of nearly 20,000 employees found that those with unhealthy eating habits were 66% more likely to report a loss in productivity, and those who rarely ate fruits and vegetables at work were about 93% more likely to report a major drop in productivity (HERO Study: Mills, P. R., et al. (2012)).

And it starts with the basics.

Fewer than 1 in 10 UK adults meet the recommended daily fibre intake. Fibre supports gut health, satiety, energy balance, and long-term disease prevention. Small additions like fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, or beans to your meals can help improve concentration, digestion, and stamina.

One key busy team member I worked with is a great example:

She was struggling with cravings, focus and weight management. Evenings often meant raiding the cupboard, and the worry about it would already sap her focus earlier in the working day. She regularly bought one of those recipe kit meals but said she never felt full afterwards. Together we focused on one simple habit. This was adding healthy, gut‑loving, filling foods to her existing, busy routine. Tins of beans are an easy go‑to; they take ages to go out of date and can be added to almost any other convenience food. They are also full of fibre and plant protein, and help lower the risk of many lifestyle diseases. She added a tin of beans and some leek to her recipe kit curry just two hours after our coaching session and said, “That is the first time my partner and I have been full after one of these meals. Honestly.” It did not take an overhaul, it was just a small change she can carry into the rest of her life.

From short-lived ambitions to reliable performance

Forget the all‑or‑nothing approach, which is painful, energy‑draining and ultimately unsustainable. Real energy comes from small, consistent habits that become part of your daily rhythm. Changes have to overcome workplace and personal life barriers, from lack of time and knowledge to stress, mental health and the pressure to be “on” all the time. The most effective shifts are the ones that feel manageable, not overwhelming.

Start simple:

• Keep roasted chickpeas, edamame beans or mixed nuts at your desk for steady energy.

• Add a piece of fruit in place of one sugary snack (or have them together if the habit swap is too stark).

• Sip water throughout the day to support focus and productivity.

• Keep the mantra of “progress over perfection”.

Perfection never works, is short-lived and can create more frustration than results. What works is stacking small, repeatable habits that add up. Leaders must enable it and model it themselves. Wellbeing is not just an employee perk. It links people’s health directly to profit. When you visibly prioritise these habits, you signal that performance and energy go hand in hand, and that you’re serious about creating a great workplace culture.

References

• Vitality Britain’s Healthiest Workplace: Vitality. (2024, January 23). Poor health at work responsible for £138bn loss.

• HERO Study: Mills, P. R., et al. (2012). Poor employee health habits drive lost productivity. Population Health Management, 15(5). HERO/Healthways press release

• Gu, X. et al. (2024) ‘Global adherence to a healthy and sustainable diet and potential prevention of premature deaths’, *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, 121(49), p. e2319008121.

• Tarro L et al. (2020). Effectiveness of workplace interventions for improving absenteeism, productivity, and work ability: A systematic review and meta-analysis. *Int J Environ Res Public Health* 17(6):1901.

• The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. *The Lancet*, 406(10512):1625-1700. Published online October 2, 2025 (11 Oct 2025 print). DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01201-2.

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 8

Carl Brooks leads sustainability for CBRE's property management business — a role he built from scratch when he joined as the first embedded sustainability hire in the PM division.

With a career spanning 25 years from waste management consultancy to developer-operator roles at Hammerson and MAPP, Carl now oversees sustainability across one of the largest property management platforms on the planet:

• 19,000 buildings

• 2 billion square feet

• Across 41 countries

This episode is a ground-level look at what it actually takes to deliver on the sustainability ambitions that investors and landlords are writing into contracts.

The central tension Alex and Carl dig into is one that anyone who's sat on either side of a property management agreement will recognise:

investors want more — more data, more insight, more active performance management — but the property management model is structurally low-margin, fragmented, and historically designed for risk reporting rather than value creation.

Something has to give.

The question is whether the model gets rebuilt around genuine performance, or whether the pressure just keeps compressing margins until the system breaks.

Key Timestamps

• [00:00:00] : how does property management actually deliver on sustainability commitments made at investment level?

• [00:03:50] Carl's career origin:, working with Diageo and Nike out of a seven-person office on the South Bank.

• [00:05:00] Moving into real estate 18 years ago — starting at Hammerson

• [00:06:00] Why Carl joined CBRE: the opportunity to build the first embedded, decentralised sustainability function in the PM business from scratch — at global scale.

• [00:07:00] The "big green machine" problem: how siloed business lines inside firms like CBRE and JLL mean clients see one brand but get fragmented services

• [00:10:00] The spectrum of client maturity globally: three broad contractual buckets

• [00:12:30] CBRE's PM scale: 19,000 buildings, 3.2 billion square feet, 41 countries.

• [00:18:00] The origin of the BBP Managing Agents Partnership:

• [00:20:45] What the specialist sustainability team actually looks like

• [00:21:30] Why CBRE standardised on a single data platform.

• [00:24:00] The "hourglass" model: a specialist sustainability team sitting at the centre.

• [00:26:00] AI-assisted triage at portfolio scale: virtual retrofit modelling, climate risk adaptation, benchmark analysis

• [00:29:00] The real people problem in PM: on-ground building teams care deeply about their buildings

• [00:30:00] "We want 20% more for 10% less" — the recontracting dynamic that is slowly destroying the value of property management

• [00:33:00] COVID as a watershed moment: property owners suddenly understood who was keeping the lights on and the doors open.

• [00:34:00] Centralised delivery vs. engaged delivery: why implementing solutions without involving building teams almost always reopens the performance gap

• [00:39:00] Carl's closing answer: he wants sustainability to be the actual objective — not just a filter applied to investment decisions.

• [00:42:00] The data blind spot: social impact, occupier engagement, and placemaking generate huge amounts of value that never gets captured, structured, or reported

Organisations Mentioned

• CBRE

• JLL

• LaSalle Investment Management

• MAPP (previously referenced as MAP)

• Hammerson

• Better Buildings Partnership (BBP)

• UK Green Building Council (UKGBC)

• DeepKi

• Measurabl

• Diageo

• Nike

• Amazon

• Google

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Now securing sponsors and advertisers for Season 2

Get In Touch To Sponsor

The office is not dead. But the winners will look very different.

In this standalone trailer episode, Caleb Parker sets the stage for Season 17 of Brave Ideas, a season focused on what actually drives performance in a Space as a Service world.

Across the season, Caleb speaks with founders, operators, and commercial leaders building for a new reality, one where office space has to earn the commute, and where hospitality, community, brand, technology, management, and finance all play a role in long term value creation.

From retention and pricing power to revenue quality, customer experience, and smarter operating models, this season is about what actually works.

Listen now, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

CONNECT

Caleb Parker’s LinkedIn

Work.Life Podcast Studio

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

1. Why Season 17 is focused on execution, not theory

2. What actually drives performance in modern workplace businesses

3. Why the future of office value creation depends on more than space alone

4. How leading operators are building stronger brands, stronger experiences, and better economics

5. What landlords and investors need to understand as office becomes more operationally driven

Key Takeaways for Operators

• Execution matters more than industry rhetoric

• Retention, pricing discipline, customer experience, and operational excellence are central to performance

• Hospitality, community, and brand are commercial levers, not soft extras

Key Takeaways for Real Estate Investors and Landlords

• Office is increasingly becoming a service-led, management-intensive asset class

• Revenue quality, customer relevance, and operating capability are becoming more important to long term performance

• The future winners will be defined by how well they execute, not just what space they own

Behind The Scenes

A big thank you to and the team at Flexspace AI for supporting the season as headline sponsor.

We also want to give a special shoutout to Nat and the team at Work.Life, where most of this season 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 the operators, ideas, and business models shaping the next era of office real estate.

Subscribe now

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 7

Abigail Dean is Head of Strategic Insights at Nuveen, one of the largest real estate investment managers in the world.

Her role is unusual: sustainability doesn’t sit in a silo at Nuveen,
it lives alongside research and proptech under a single team, deliberately designed to give a more unified view of what’s actually driving real estate value.

Abigail came up through sustainability at JLL before taking on this broader remit, and that journey — from specialist to strategic integrator — shapes everything she talks about in this conversation.

The central question Alex and Abigail wrestle with is one that every sustainability leader in investment management will recognise:

“How do you make this stuff land?”

Not just at the investment committee — that, Abigail argues, is too late — but embedded into deal sourcing, underwriting, due diligence, and asset management from day one.

They get into the mechanics:

• how voting rights at IC actually create accountability upstream,

• why having ex-asset managers inside the sustainability team changes everything

• how Nuveen is navigating the anti-ESG noise from the US without changing what they actually do.

They also go somewhere most episodes don’t:

• the housing crisis

• the role of private capital in affordablehousing

• the data problem that Abigail — after 20 years in the industry — still finds staggering.

If you’re a sustainability professional, an investment manager, or anyone trying to understand how institutional capital is actually making decisions right now, this one’s worth your time.

Key Timestamps

• • [00:01:00] Alex introduces Abigail and her unusual role: sustainability, research, and PropTech under one team at Nuveen

• [00:03:00] Abigail explains the logic — why those three disciplines need to talk to each other rather than operate in parallel

• [00:04:00] How mega trends, demographic shifts, and the energy transition are interconnected — and why siloed thinking gets the wrong answer

• [00:07:00] Nuveen’s scope beyond real estate: infrastructure and natural capital, and what cross-asset collaboration on strategic insights looks like

• [00:08:00] How sustainability and research feed into the investment committee — separate votes, shared process, and why that distinction matters

• [00:10:00] Why the IC vote is too late: the real work happens at pre-IC, underwriting, and due diligence — and what that looks like in practice

• [00:12:00] The debate: should sustainability sit on the IC? Abigail and Alex disagree, and both have a point

• [00:15:00] How Nuveen’s sustainability team is structured — and the shift from roughly 50/50 reporting vs. strategy to two-thirds execution and client engagement

• [00:16:00] Why hiring ex-asset managers into the sustainability team was a game-changer for integration and credibility with the investment side

• [00:20:00] The anti-ESG backlash in the US: how serious is it, and how Nuveen is navigating it without changing what they actually do

• [00:21:00] Reframing sustainability as building efficiency: why every investor agrees with it when you strip away the labels

• [00:24:00] Tracking corporate SBTi commitments — still rising — and why US city-level regulations like Local Law 97 may actually have more teeth than European equivalents

• [00:27:00] The housing crisis and private capital: is housing an asset class, should it be, and what role can institutional investors actually play?

• [00:29:00] What government needs to do to unlock private capital for affordable housing — land contributions, de-risking, and unblocking planning

• [00:33:00] What problem are you trying to solve? Abigail names data transparency as the issue she still finds staggering after two decades

• [00:37:00] Is the green premium real — and does it roll out from prime to secondary markets, or does it stay confined to institutional-grade assets?

• [00:40:00] If you could change one thing: tackling the long tail of buildings with a combination of regulation, cheap finance, and support — not just compliance burden

Organisations Mentioned

• Nuveen

• JLL

• LaSalle Investment Management

• GRESB

• Better Buildings Partnership (BBP)

• UK Green Building Council (UKGBC)

• CBRE IM

• Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)

• SFDR

• Energy Star (US)

• NABERS (Australia)

• Green (Global Real Estate Engagement Network)

• DeepKi

• CRREM

• Local Law 97 (New York City)

• DCCS (Washington DC)

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Now securing sponsors and advertisers for Season 2

Get In Touch To Sponsor

In 2013, I was the cofounder and CEO of TouchdownSpace, a startup built on a simple idea: accessing professional office space should be far easier.

Our tagline was, “everyone’s private office, on demand.”

What sat underneath that was a broader belief that offices should work more like hotels, easy to access, easy to book, and run with hospitality in mind.

At the time, that idea felt early, and to many in the market it looked niche.
Looking back, the more important point is not the startup itself. It is the demand signal behind it.

What looked like a product idea then now looks more like an early signal of how office may need to perform in a market where investors are placing greater weight on income durability, customer demand, and operating quality, rather than relying on exit assumptions to do most of the work.

That is why this story matters now.

The Signal Was About More Than Access, It Was About Asset Performance

Even then, users were signalling something important.

They wanted professional space without the friction of traditional leasing. They wanted privacy without long-term commitment. They wanted convenience, immediacy, and a better experience.

In simple terms, they wanted office space to behave less like a static real estate product and more like a service.

That matters because once office starts to be experienced as a service rather than simply occupied as space, the implications go beyond user experience.

The product changes.
The operating model changes.
And over time, the quality and durability of the income stream can change too.

What first appears to be a customer preference can eventually become an underwriting issue.

Why Prior Cycles Did Not Need to Underwrite This Properly

For much of the previous cycle, many real estate strategies could still rely heavily on exit assumptions and cap rate compression.

In that environment, operational weakness was easier to hide.
A building did not always need to be especially differentiated, customer-centric, or well run for the numbers to work. Market movement could do much of the heavy lifting.

That was one reason service-led and hospitality-led office concepts were often dismissed as niche, operationally messy, or difficult to scale.

The customer demand may have been real, but the capital stack did not yet need to fully recognise it.

In other words, the market was not ignoring the signal because it did not exist. It was ignoring it because prior underwriting frameworks did not need to price it accurately.

Zoom Out Beyond One Cycle

To understand where office may be heading, it helps to zoom out beyond the last cycle.

Read more

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 6

Rahul Parekh is a Partner at 2150, the venture capital fund created by and for one of the Nordics’ largest real estate investors (now under the Urban Partners brand) — a €20 billion platform that combines real estate capital with venture capital to accelerate the adoption of climate technologies in the built environment.

2150 has just closed its second fund at €210 million, bringing their total AUM to nearly half a billion euros, deployed into what they call Gigacorn companies — businesses with the potential to remove gigatons of carbon while generating real financial returns. But the tension is real: venture capital needs returns in 7–10 years, real estate moves slowly, and procurement cycles are brutal.

So is VC even the right tool for this problem?

In this conversation, Rahul and Alex challenge both sides — why innovation adoption in real estate is still so broken, what it actually takes for cleantech founders to raise capital and break into the sector, and why the next wave of climate tech might look a lot more like AI than renewable energy.

Key timestamps:

• [00:03:04] From Goldman Sachs to VC — Rahul’s career path into climate investing

• [00:06:08] The origin story of 2150 — how a real estate business decided to back innovation

• [00:07:43] Thinking in cities, not buildings —the urban tech thesis

• [00:09:13] The climate tech funding gap — why built environment was being ignored in 2020

• [00:10:56] Where 2150 invests — Series A &B, execution risk over technology risk

• [00:12:39] Hardware vs. software — why you need both to have real impact

• [00:13:15] Portfolio construction — finding winners across software, hardware, and the combination

• [00:17:44] Ember: building the electric bus company from the ground up in Scotland

• [00:22:47] The building automation problem — why the journey from £10m to £50m ARR is so hard

• [00:24:13] How the VC-real estate relationship actually works in practice — and where it doesn’t

• [00:28:35] Lux Well: next-generation vacuum insulated glass and what it takes to displace incumbents

• [00:30:41] The funding gap for hardware founders— and the credit product that doesn’t exist yet

• [00:35:08] Data centres, energy demand, and whythe grid won’t cope — from 2% to 25–30% of global electricity

• [00:37:07] AI and scrap metal — how Metal is unlocking primary-grade aluminium from secondary sources

• [00:39:01] Circular economy in the built environment — the promise of material passporting and the logistics problem

• [00:42:07] Climate tech 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 — how the market has changed three times in six years

• [00:45:03] The direct energy market — cutting out the middleman between generators and corporates

• [00:46:29] If you could change one thing?

Organisations Mentioned

• 2150

• Urban Partners

• Goldman Sachs

• Global Founders Capital

• Ember (electric bus company, Scotland)

• Lux Well (vacuum insulated glass)

• Meatal (AI-powered secondary metals trading)

• JLL

• LaSalle Investment Management

• Stagecoach / Megabus

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Now securing sponsors and advertisers for Season 2

Get In Touch To Sponsor

At Brave Corp, we recently walked away from acquiring a small portfolio of hospitality-led, trading real estate assets that were marketed as stabilised, with further upside through a roll-up strategy.

Context, this was a multi-asset operating platform opportunity in a major UK city. We are keeping the details anonymous for confidentiality.

The assets were strong, the underlying product had quality, and there was a clear platform thesis. A roll-up strategy would have created genuine economies of scale, centralised revenue management, procurement leverage, and operational optimisation. In short, a realistic path to expanding EBITDA through better execution.

So why did we walk away?

Because we couldn’t agree on the one thing that matters most in value-add, the entry price.

Why value-add only works if you buy today’s cashflow

In operational real estate, there are two different numbers that should not be blended together in a negotiation.

1. In-place EBITDA, what the business is producing today

2. Stabilised EBITDA, what it could produce after the buyer executes improvements

In this case, the vendor (seller) anchored to (future) stabilised EBITDA and priced the assets accordingly. We underwrote in-place EBITDA and treated stabilised EBITDA as value we would have to create.

That difference makes or breaks the entire deal.

If you pay a price that assumes stabilised EBITDA before you have delivered it, you are paying the seller for your own business plan.

Why should they be in the economics of your upside?

The roll-up thesis was real, but it had to be earned

We liked the platform logic.

In a multi-asset operating platform, scale can create real value:

• Portfolio-level revenue management and distribution strategy

• Shared operating infrastructure and SOPs

• Procurement savings and vendor renegotiation

• Standardised staffing models and training

• Faster learning loops and performance benchmarking across sites

Those levers are why roll-ups can work in operational real estate.
They are also why the buyer must have room in the entry price to fund execution and earn a return.

If the seller prices the deal as if those levers have already been pulled, the buyer is left taking execution risk without being compensated for it.

But what about “vendor financing”?

During negotiations, the vendor proposed bridging the valuation gap via deferred consideration, structured as a vendor loan.

Deferred consideration can be helpful, but it doesn’t change the basic economics unless it is structured correctly.

If the total consideration still reflects future performance rather than current performance, the buyer is still paying for upside up front. A vendor loan can reduce cash at completion, but it doesn’t reduce the amount the buyer is ultimately paying.

Worse, if the vendor loan is structured like senior secured debt, fixed cash-pay interest, tight default triggers, and restrictions that block dividends or refinancing flexibility, it can make the deal harder to underwrite, not easier. It shifts liquidity risk to the buyer at precisely the moment the buyer needs flexibility to execute the value-add plan.

Rule of thumb:

If the seller wants to be paid on stabilised EBITDA, the uplift portion should be contingent on performance actually being delivered.

What would have made the deal work

We did not deny there was upside.
We agreed the upside existed.

But there is a difference between acknowledging upside and paying for it on day one.

The fairest solution in value-add operational real estate is simple:

• Price the acquisition on today’s cashflows

• Pay for upside only once upside is delivered

There are multiple tools to do this properly:

• Earn-outs tied to audited EBITDA milestones

• Performance-linked deferred consideration that only becomes payable once targets are reached

• Contingent payments triggered by refinance proceeds after performance is stabilised

These structures align incentives.
They ensure the vendor is not paid for value they did not create, and the buyer is not underwriting execution risk with no margin for error.

How we underwrite these opportunities at Brave

We run every opportunity through an IC-style model with conservative exit assumptions and a hard walk-away price.

A few principles drive our underwriting:

• Entry price anchored to in-place EBITDA and current risk

• All-in underwriting, taxes, SDLT, fees, reserves, CapEx, and exit yield sensitivity

• Any vendor paper must be refinanceable and cannot block sensible distributions during the hold period

• Upside paid only when delivered, via contingent structures rather than headline pricing

• Priority given to situations where operational levers are controllable and measurable within 12–24 months

These guardrails are what protect capital, and they are what allow us to compound returns when the operating plan performs.

The takeaway

Operational real estate can be a powerful value-add strategy, especially in a platform context.

The upside can be real.

But value-add only works if entry price reflects current performance and current risk.

If the vendor prices in the uplift, the buyer loses the upside.
At that point, the buyer is no longer investing in value-add, they are financing the vendor’s exit at the buyer’s expense.

We walked away not because we disliked the assets, but because the price and structure asked us to pay today for value that would only exist tomorrow.

And in value-add, paying twice is the fastest way to destroy returns.

What this means for Brave

At Brave Corp, we’re applying this underwriting discipline across acquisitions, asset-light partnerships, and selective development, always focused on operator-led value creation.

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 5

Commercial real estate has no shortage of decarbonisation plans. What it lacks is the infrastructure to execute them.

Pål Hauff Hvattum, CEO of CQuel, knows this from the inside out — and he's spent the last two years building the solution.

Spun out of Hines Global Ventures with Aroundtown as a second shareholder, CQuel is a tech-enabled implementation platform for commercial real estate retrofits.

Not another dashboard.
Not another consultant.

A marketplace that connects vetted retrofit suppliers with asset managers who have a decarbonisation plan sitting in a drawer and no clear path to execution.

Pål brings an unusual perspective: fifteen years building online marketplaces across Europe (including Gumtree), followed by a stint scaling a solar energy marketplace across Europe.

Key Timestamps

[00:01:35] — Why This Podcast — Incubating Ideas in Real Estate
[00:02:27] — From Marketplaces to Missions — Pål's Origin Story
[00:05:02] — The Hines Phone Call — How CQuel Was Born
[00:07:49] — Sandbox First: Testing Inside the Portfolio
[00:10:21] — Who Is the Customer and What's the Value Proposition?
[00:11:15] — The 70% Opportunity — Why Light Retrofits Are the Real Play
[00:13:58] — The Three Broken Options: Consultant, In-House, SaaS
[00:14:46] — The Implementation Platform — How CQuel Works
[00:16:08] — The Brief Builder — Why a Better Brief Gets 40% Better Prices
[00:16:53] — A Two-Sided Marketplace — 16-Step Supplier Vetting
[00:24:28] — Two Corporate Parents: Hines Ventures + Aroundtown
[00:28:48] — The Numbers: 80% Time Reduction, 8% Cost Pressure
[00:29:35] — 83 Bids, Five Megawatts, One Procurement Nightmare
[00:31:13] — 200 Hours to 30 — How AI is Tackling Q&A in Tenders
[00:38:09] — The Rate of Retrofit Needs to Triple
[00:39:06] — Why Nobody Wants Another Dashboard
[00:40:55] — What Problem Needs Solving?
[00:41:12] — What Government Must Do ?

Organisations Mentioned

• Hines Global Ventures
• Aroundtown
• CQuel
• Otovo (solar marketplace)
• Schibsted / Gumtree / eBay
• Mac49 (venture builder)

What You'll Learn About

• Why the decarbonisation problem is implementation, not planning

• How marketplace dynamics apply to commercial real estate retrofit

• The three broken models: consultant, in-house team, point SaaS solutions

• What a good tender brief is actually worth (hint: up to 40% better pricing)

• How AI is cutting procurement time from 200 hours to 30 hours

• Why 70% of retrofits are simpler — and more scalable — than the industry thinks

• What corporate venture building looks like when it works

• Why regulatory clarity matters more than regulatory perfection

• Why the retrofit rate needs to triple — and what that demands of the supply chain

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Now securing sponsors and advertisers for Season 2

Get In Touch To Sponsor

When people assess a mixed-use development, the conversation usually starts with the mix:

Office, hotel, food and beverage, wellness, amenity, members club.

Those uses matter, of course.
But in my experience, investor returns start taking shape earlier than that, in the decisions that determine how those uses fit together within the building.

That came into focus for me again on a recent design call. On the surface, the discussion was technical: lifts, circulation, daylight, views, ceiling heights, floorplate efficiency, guest flow, member access. Underneath all of it was a more important commercial question:

How do you plan the building in a way that helps the whole asset perform better?

That is where the economics of mixed-use really begin.

Returns in mixed-use come from creating a destination people want to visit, one that feels intuitive to move through, energised in the right places, and strong enough in experience to pull people back again and again. That is what drives footfall, dwell time, repeat visitation, pricing power, and stronger asset performance over time.

Investor returns start taking shape in the design decisions that determine how uses fit together within the building.

Mixed-use returns are shaped before the model is finished

This is where mixed-use is still too often misunderstood.

A lot of schemes are approached as a scheduling exercise. Allocate the uses. Build the area schedule. Forecast the rents. Model the income streams. Yet mixed-use outperformance rarely comes from the schedule alone. It comes from the quality of interaction between uses, and from whether the building feels coherent as a place.

That is why design planning matters so much.

The way a building is organised shapes the experience from the moment someone arrives. It determines what feels public and what feels private. It influences what draws people in, what encourages them to stay, and what makes the building feel active rather than fragmented. It affects whether movement through the asset feels seamless or awkward, natural or forced.

If the arrival experience is weak, if circulation is clumsy, if the most valuable uses sit in the wrong parts of the building, or if operational friction undermines the experience, the asset becomes harder to activate, harder to differentiate, and harder to monetise at the level it should.

That is why I think investors need to pay much closer attention to the early spatial decisions that shape the asset, long before the scheme is too far advanced.

The building has to work as a system

Take vertical circulation as one example.

Lift strategy is often treated as a technical workstream. In reality, it has direct commercial consequences. It affects how different users move through the building, how much friction they experience, how much crossover exists between audiences, and how much usable area is either recovered or lost. It influences waiting times, access control, floorplate efficiency, and ultimately the overall quality of the experience.

The same is true of servicing, core layout, and floorplate planning.

These are often discussed as design or operational matters. In mixed-use, they shape value creation directly. If one use compromises the experience, efficiency, or economics of another, the impact shows up in performance.

This is why I increasingly see these decisions as part of the investment strategy. They shape how the asset functions day to day, how different audiences experience it, and how effectively the building converts design intent into commercial performance.

Different uses create value in different ways

The same logic applies to where different uses sit within the building.

Not every use creates value in the same way. Some benefit disproportionately from light, views, and a greater sense of volume. Others derive more value from visibility, convenience, ease of servicing, or proximity to the ground floor. Some uses need to sit close to the energy of the building. Others perform better with a degree of separation, privacy, or elevation. Some create destination pull for the whole asset. Others monetise calm, exclusivity, or efficiency.

Treating all uses as spatially interchangeable is one of the fastest ways to weaken a mixed-use scheme.

A flexible workplace may justify better daylight and stronger volume if those qualities translate into stronger demand and better pricing. A hospitality or food and beverage use may deserve a more prominent position if it increases activation, extends dwell time, and strengthens the overall magnetism of the asset. Shared amenities may be most valuable when they encourage crossover without disrupting the operational clarity of the building.

These are decisions that shape how value is created and distributed across the asset.

The best mixed-use developments succeed when the uses have been planned in a way that strengthens the logic of the whole building. They create momentum, energy, and a clear sense of place, while preserving operational clarity.

Returns in mixed-use begin to take shape when a building starts to function as a destination, not just a collection of uses.

Destination is what turns design into returns

That balance matters. In mixed-use, the goal is selective integration. You want enough interaction to create vibrancy, destination appeal, and cross-pollination between uses. At the same time, you need enough separation to protect experience, manage access, support servicing, and preserve the economics of each component.

That is a much harder discipline than simply assembling a mix of uses.

It requires seeing the building as a system.

This is also where I think some investors still get mixed-use wrong. They focus heavily on inclusion, what uses are in the scheme, while spending less time on interaction, how those uses actually work together spatially, operationally, and commercially.

Inclusion alone rarely creates outperformance.

Interaction does.

A hotel above a workplace above a restaurant does not automatically become a destination. A members club beside flexible office space does not automatically create community. A rooftop venue does not automatically create pricing power. Those outcomes depend on whether the building has been planned in a way that makes each use stronger because of the others around it.

That is the real challenge.

It means asking better questions much earlier. Which uses deserve the best light? Which uses should capture the strongest views? Which uses need immediate access? Which should anchor the ground floor? Where should energy build during the day, and where should it build in the evening? Where should public and private uses overlap, and where should they remain distinct?

Those are design questions.

They also shape investment outcomes.

Because returns in mixed-use begin to take shape when a building starts to function as a destination, not just a collection of uses.

And that happens in the early design decisions that define how the whole asset comes together.

That is where mixed-use stops being a concept and starts becoming an investment case.

Caleb Parker is the CEO of Brave Corporation, an operational real estate platform repositioning underutilized office assets through hospitality-led strategies.

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 4

The conversation explores how the dialogue has shifted from “What is proptech?” to “How do we execute digital transformation?”

Sammy shares insights on the psychology of change, the necessity of “getting the plumbing right” for AI adoption, and how the UKPA is working with the government to scale technology in housing. Whether you are a tech entrepreneur or a real estate manager, this episode offers a roadmap for navigating the looming AI disruption and realizing the true value of digital tools.

Key timestamps:

[00:01:16] The Psychology of Proptech - Sammy explains how her background in psychology helps her navigate the “human” side of innovation
[00:03:30] Creating “Real Estate UK” - A deep dive into the strategic merger between the UK Proptech Association (UKPA) and the British Property Federation (BPF).
[00:10:45] The Proptech Growth Partnership - Details on the collaborative work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (mHCLG)
[00:15:30] The Digital Maturity Gap - Alex and Sammy discuss the disparity between “Blue Chip” companies with dedicated innovation teams and the “long tail” of smaller property owners.
[00:19:45] Fixing the “Data Plumbing” for AIA critical segment on AI readiness - Sammy argues that before firms can leverage Generative AI, they must fix their “plumbing”
[00:24:50] State of the Market: Consolidation & Investment - An analysis of why the UK proptech market has remained at roughly 800 companies for years.
[00:28:15] From Dashboards to Workflows - Why the “standalone dashboard” era is ending.
[00:35:50] Engaging the “Long Tail” of Real Estate - How the UKPA is working to democratize innovation.
[00:41:20] The Government “Magic Wand” - In the closing segment, Sammy shares what she would ask for from the government.

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Now securing sponsors and advertisers for Season 2

Get In Touch To Sponsor

The Future We Build - Season 1, Episode 3

This is an unusually honest conversation about burnout, the shift from strategic thinking to operational execution, and why the fractional model might be the future of sustainability leadership in real estate.

Key Timestamps

[00:01:17] - Why are we all ex-heads of sustainability? Setting the scene
[00:02:08] - Robbie's journey to fractional advisory
[00:05:34] - Emily's transition: losing strategic foresight in "control mode"[00:08:16] - Have we outgrown the role, or has the role outgrown us?[00:11:07] - Sustainability teams now need to justify ROI
[00:15:01] - Emily on resilience: asking difficult questions vs. pleasing the client
[00:17:14] - Did in-house roles lose the "challenger" voice?
[00:18:38] - Infrastructure booming while real estate churns
[00:20:00] - Green hushing: "keep our heads down"
[00:21:11] - Emily: we've lost the sense of innovation
[00:22:07] - Was net zero set with genuine understanding—or peer pressure?[00:27:09] - Emily: nature is now a strategic national security risk (Defra)[00:31:14] - The future of energy as a service
[00:32:08] - Emily on ROI: we're not accounting for wider structural benefits
[00:33:40] - Parting wisdom for those still in post
[00:38:12] - Protecting your energy and mental health
[00:40:06] - The emerging network: fractional work as a new collaborative model
[00:42:10] - Final question: one thing you'd want from government, business, or individuals
[00:46:50] - The AI/data centre nexus exposing supply chain fragility

What You’ll Learn

• The shift from strategic, creative roles to operational, task-oriented execution

• Infrastructure funds thriving while real estate sustainability roles contract

• The rise of fractional CSO

• VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) requiring both create and control

• Have senior leaders outgrown the role, or has the role outgrown them?

• Can’t separate climate adaptation, biodiversity, and net zero—need integrated approach

• Water, land, supply chains: nature’s fundamental impact on real estate

• Current ROI calculations only account for single-asset benefits, missing wider structural benefits: grid contribution, area regeneration, systemic value

• Mental Health and Burnout of CSOs

• Advice for CSOs and sustainability teams

• The AI race and the natural resources it depends upon

Key Resources

• DEFRA

Subscribe to join the conversation about the future we’re building—together.

🎙️ The Future We Build

Building a sustainable future, one conversation at a time.

New episodes released weekly.

Filmed at the MUTE showroom

Follow on:

• ⁠YouTube⁠

• ⁠LinkedIn

• Apple

Real estate investors spend a lot of time trying to predict markets.
A less common question is how the systems those markets operate inside actually behave over time, and how they shape what buildings can realistically become.

Much of the conversation about the future of offices focuses on markets, cycles, valuations and policy.

Those things matter.

But for owners and operators deploying capital into long-duration assets, a more fundamental question sits underneath all of it:

How does the system you are operating inside actually behave over time?

This piece is written for real estate investors and operators.
To reach conclusions that matter for asset performance, it helps to zoom out for a moment. Real estate outcomes are shaped by larger forces that influence incentives, behaviour, and the pace of change. Those forces tend to move slowly, often unevenly, and rarely on the timelines investors would prefer.

We will return to real estate. But first, the system.

Key takeaway

In office real estate, systems change slowly.

That means the biggest upside rarely comes from betting on reform. It comes from disciplined operations, thoughtful design, and steady execution within the rules that already exist.

Understanding this requires stepping back and looking at how large systems actually evolve over time.

Read more