According to HigherGov, the General Services Administration (GSA) posted an RFP on March 4th to "implement an enterprise-wide, scalable marketplace solution to optimize its real estate portfolio and streamline the management of federal office space". This week we heard that this contract has been awarded as two 12-month pilots.

As of curation, we have confirmed that two booking platforms are involved. LiquidSpace will be working with Trebellar on their solution in San Francisco. Upflex is leaning on their existing integration partnership with Gospace AI in conjunction with DHC Real Estate Services, a certified veteran-owned small business, for a pilot in Chicago.

This is a developing story, and in many ways would break government contracting records for speed – going from RFP to two pilots in weeks. It does follow/build on previous GSA contracts or flex-forward moves we’ve covered including the flex workspace contract vehicle and the FedCowork pilot. Stay tuned to This Week in Coworking as we continue to cover this story.

Mark Gilbreath from Liquidspace joins Hector Kolonas for a quick, but hopefully helpful, dive behind the news to explore how this acronym-filled GSA EWM "thing" impacts coworking spaces… if at all.

The team at LiquidSpace have shared that they’ve upgraded their Slack app, allowing enterprise teams to book and manage their workspaces without ever leaving the chat and messaging platform.

This follows a trend we’re following where booking platforms are increasingly abstracting away the actual searching and booking platforms deep into other non-booking apps usually used by internal teams for messaging, meeting scheduling, team coordination and others. As these integrations unlock more demand (and ideally boost utilization) that’s more booking revenue for some of the spaces listed on those platforms

LiquidSpace has unveiled Team Connect, a new enterprise-focused tool designed to streamline in-person team coordination and workspace management. The platform features an interactive map showing team members’ workspace bookings, enables users to follow colleagues’ workspace patterns, and facilitates group reservations. The tool also includes analytics capabilities to help organizations optimize their workspace resources and identify popular meeting locations among team members.

LiquidSpace had an integration partnership with Kadence, but was more a one way user flow from Kadence customers booking their suggested meeting times on LiquidSpace. It makes sense they’d want to also offer a similar feature to the customers that are running the enterprise version of their platform.

In this episode of the This Week in Coworking podcast, we bring together four industry experts—Carly Bedini (iQ Offices), Sam Shea (Liquidspace), Chiko Abengowe (Perfect Office), and Stormy McBride (GCUC) — to discuss the evolving landscape of coworking careers.