Yardi has officially announced the acquisition of both Deskpass and Hubble. This strategic move expands Yardi’s offerings in the flexible workspace market and strengthens its existing solutions, including Yardi Commercial, Yardi Kube and CoworkingCafe.

The acquisition will enable Yardi to provide a wider-reaching suite of tools for managing coworking spaces, from operations through to marketing to lead generation and revenue insights.

Questions to ponder:
1. Will commission structures on these platforms change, to bring them more in-line with CoworkingCafe’s no commission approach? And if they do, what does it mean for competitors for each platform like Liquidspace, FlowSpace, Desana, Upflex and Gable?
2. Does this create any longer-term ties between Industrious (who had acquired a majority of Deskpass recently) and Yardi?
3. What does this mean in relation to Anant’s big plan for a global interconnected booking experience?
4. Who will be joining the TWIC podcast to answer these and other Qs for you?

PS Got Qs you’d like answered? Let us know by replying to this email

Neowin reports on Microsoft Places, their new Teams app that helps employees coordinate where to work from based on who else will be in/around. This lines Microsoft up to compete with some of the hybrid work platforms (like Gable, Desana, Deskpass, OfficeRnD Hybrid, Kadence, LiquidSpace and Café) – some of which may already built integrations with Teams to support enterprise customers.

Although Places was initially hinted at 2 years ago, I did note how this could impact coworking spaces here. In short: it may only be a matter of time before Places is extended to offer 3rd-party or third space bookings, access and visibility too.

Desana introduced a new product called FlexPay into their suite for companies shifting towards flexible real estate strategies. In short, the platform will offer a single procurement agreement, centralize payments and offer a dashboard for contract management.

The easier it is for large firms to procure, pay for and manage their flex space contracts, the more utilization we could see across participating spaces.

Holly Farmer shares that Desana are launching ‘Desana Events’ to make event booking and management more streamlined for global orgs.

Given that the platform doesn’t own or run their own spaces, this should mean more event-based bookings via them for participating spaces in their network.

This week we saw Desana sponsor/power a RunningRemote session delving into distributed workplaces, targeted at remote-first or increasingly-remote companies.

I often get asked which booking platforms workspaces should invest their time, energy and commissions to create and manage listings on. My best piece of advice is to look for the platforms who are growing the reach of flex space, and therefor your listings and business.