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

In what has been a busy week for Yardi, they also announced a refreshed look and updates to their Yardi Kube product. This update focusing on their "prospect portal", significantly upgrading the UX and UI for those searching for, and wanting to easily book, workspaces.

VINCI, a major French utility company, has introduced Bikube, a new brand combining co-living and coworking spaces, with its first location opening in Lyon. The concept offers complimentary coworking facilities for residents while providing day passes for non-guests, along with meeting rooms and event spaces for rent.

The company plans to expand the Bikube network across major French cities, with upcoming locations in Montpellier (2025) and Suresnes, Paris region (2026), targeting business travelers, young professionals, and those seeking alternatives to traditional accommodations.

Yardi Kube‘s latest white paper focusing on coworking’s "suburban surge". In the paper, several industry experts share what they believe and see to be driving this trend.

We also see some interesting new data-points, namely that 15% of all office space enquiries that move through Yardi’s listing network are for coworking space (up from 6% in 2022). Turner Levison also highlights that the suburban coworking footprint has swelled by 9M sqft in just one year, while suburban demand has surged by 240%.

Keith Larsen from TheRealDeal shares an increasingly popular theory around why Yardi took a majority stake of WeWork, in that the former is looking to "fix and then flip" the latter for a "small profit". It’s possible, but given the other properties Yardi owns in coworking, there still could be a pure

Even though I did call it that Yardi would become a WeWork investor back in 2013, I did then call that IWG would land up acquiring WeWork for the franchise play, I may still be ‘in the money’ as they say.

However, since then, a new player has started making waves with acquisitions within the franchise space. Could we see Vast Coworking Group move in here? What if Yardi takes WeWork private first?