Members & Margins

Why Members & Margins

Members speak to culture. Margins speak to sustainability.

Members & Margins is the research and insights publication of CoworkingConsulting.com. The name is the idea.

There is a running argument in this industry about what a coworking space is. One side calls it community, a community that happens to have a coworking space, as one operator put it, and says you cannot buy that, only build it. The other side calls it flexible workspace, an asset with a rent roll and a safe share of the building, and the people who own the buildings rarely say the word hospitality at all. Coworking is sold as hospitality and underwritten as real estate, and the two sides mostly do not read each other.

The community voices rarely underwrite, and the real estate voices have rarely hosted a Tuesday or sat on a neighborhood board. Operators live in the middle of it, the only people who have to speak both languages every day.

We think both sides are right, and that the argument is the point. A coworking space is a membership in both directions: the people who walk in and why they stay, the host at nine in the morning, the room at six, and the space’s own place in the block it sits on, the local economy it feeds, the ecosystem of operators and partners it belongs to. It is also a business that has to stay open next year: rent per square foot going out, revenue per square foot coming in, the office mix that sets the gap between them, and the NOI that is left when the month is paid for.

Every decision on one side moves the other. A warmer room shows up as renewals. The office sizes you build decide who your members are, solo professionals or five-person teams. A space the neighborhood uses is a building the market values. The ampersand is the whole idea: two sides of one subject, and every piece here is written to hold both.