Week 49, 2025

As we recently covered, the UK’s VOA is reclassifying coworking flexible workspaces across the country.

In short, entire coworking floors become one property. Members lose their tax relief, and operators get the bill. Bernie Mitchell (and NotebookLM) put together a 7-minute video explaining what’s happening and what you can do about it.

We believe that there’s probably a coworking space for every kind of worker, so when we saw that Drew White, who recently "trashed" coworking spaces admit he got it wrong, and had no clue that spaces like The Root Coworking even existed.

What illuminated the space, it’s community, and the culture for Drew? Being invited in to have a coffee. So if you see someone bashing coworking (and missing what makes your space awesome) invite them over for a coffee.

An interesting look behind Ashish Agarwal‘s service-focussed growth of Enzyme Office Spaces to 1.55M sqft of flex space across India, and a potential 2018 IPO.

You may think you know what your members think and feel about your space, but unless you ask, it’s all a hunch. An educated guess. But now it’s the end of the year, it’s a perfect moment to pause and ask: How did we really do? Coworks share some background to these surveys, questions to ask, and even a starter template.

You don’t have to be part of the solution to the loneliness epidemic. It’s perfectly reasonable that you just run a nice space that people can work out of. But… what if your vision was bigger than that? What if you decided to be a place where people could connect, learn, grow, and belong? Cat Johnson digs into this in her latest note.

Thilo Utke, Rosee Shrestha, Georgi Aleksiev and other Cobot team members put together a fun video that creatively shows how room bookings are faster than ever on their new mobile app.

Bullpen Capital, who recently backed Switchyards shares a pretty interesting article about the company.

The shots fired? The piece is titled "Michael Tavani delivers what coworking never could".

Co-founder and CEO of Vallist, Alexander Passler reflects on how flex spaces like theirs are moving away from leases to partnerships, and that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to growing in this way.

It’s all about utilisation. A space can be 90% occupied yet still have bookable resources sitting empty. Emily Nguyen looks at how utilisation really indicates whether your space is performing at peak levels, and where opportunities are hiding in this Nexudus note.

Asen Stoyanchev at OfficeRnD shares a step-by-step month-end billing runbook to help reduce (and maybe eliminate) the monthly spreadsheet chaos and panic many multi-location coworking space teams find themselves in.

Remember when everyone was generating doll versions of themselves? Well there’s another Gen AI trend doing it’s rounds, based on a Nano Banana Pro prompt shared by Yev Nesin, a Global Growth Lead at Google.

In short, people are generating cute little isometric miniature 3D cartoon scenes of their city. Could be a fun way to show off what your city looks like, and maybe engage other locals via social channels?