For decades, the commercial office lease has been straightforward – a tenant signs a long-term agreement, pays a fixed rent, and the landlord services their debt. But a growing number of businesses don’t need an office all the time, and that shift is forcing landlords to rethink the model entirely. Can office rents alone still cover the mortgage and fixed costs? Should part of the building shift to retail or hospitality to lift the yield? And what’s the right split between traditional office and flexible workspace as appetites for floor space continue to change?
A flex membership is structurally opposite – access to a workspace when you need it. Pay for what you use. Commit to nothing long-term. This concept took off around 2010 as a niche offering for freelancers and early-stage startups. Today, it’s a mainstream corporate real estate product, used by everyone from sole operators to Fortune 500 employers rebalancing global workforce strategy.
While the product matures, the market sees the demand behind it compounding.
This matters for landlords for an underappreciated reason: a significant and growing share of demand has shifted from traditional square-metre leases to flexible access and memberships.
Three forces driving the shift
Hybrid work has become the baseline, not the trend.
Approximately three-quarters of organisations globally operate formal hybrid policies, with most settling into a 2–3 day in-office rhythm. Companies no longer need a permanent desk for every employee. They need professional workspace available on the days their teams are together, and increasingly, in multiple locations close to where employees actually live.
The reality is now too obvious to ignore
A flex membership costs a fraction of a traditional lease, with no capex, no facilities overhead, no reinstatement liability, and no lock-in. Small businesses are saving money. And CBRE research indicates that for large enterprises it can be transformational, where roughly 31% are now using flex specifically to enter new markets without standing up permanent offices, reducing setup times from months to days.
The product itself has grown up
From a desk, a chair, and some Wi-Fi, the current version is multi-location access networks, enterprise-grade security, private team suites bookable by the month, meeting rooms bookable by the hour, event spaces, member-to-member referral networks, and — increasingly — integrated data on how the space is actually being used. The top operators now look more like hospitality businesses with real estate components than real estate businesses with service layers.
What landlords need to know
According to the fifth edition Workthere Flexmark Operator Survey, corporate occupiers now account for 47% of global flex office occupancy, up from 13% in 2020. That’s a re-composition of the customer base in five years.
JLL’s Future of Work Survey states that 42% of corporate occupiers intend to increase their use of flexible space, with more than half preferring to access it via third-party providers rather than building it themselves.
In a 2026 article, Gable found that enterprise flex memberships grew 27% in 2024, and 59% of companies planning workspace expansion now say they’re choosing flex over traditional leases. UK managed-office supply jumped 111% year-on-year in early 2025, which reflects a direct response from operators and landlords to surging enterprise demand for larger, private, turnkey flex suites.
The London market, which is usually 3–5 years ahead of most others on these dynamics, is the clearest signal. Spaces to Places’ UK Flex Office Market 2025 report, states that flexible workspace now accounts for approximately 10% of London’s total office stock, up from about 6% in 2019, and UK flex office inventory jumped 32% year-on-year in Q1 2025 to 8.6 million square feet. Corporate deals of 2–3 year managed-office terms have emerged as the single fastest-growing segment — interim solutions that companies are using while they reconfigure their main offices, and which increasingly don’t revert to traditional leases afterwards.
At the project level, the Standard Chartered–IWG deal remains the template. According to Regus, in 2021 the bank signed a global agreement giving 95,000 employees access to 3,500 workspaces across IWG’s network. The rationale wasn’t cost primarily; it was hybrid resilience and commute equity. Employees could work from a serviced centre near home instead of travelling to central HQ every day. Three years on, variants of the same structure have been adopted by NTT, Standard Chartered’s peer banks, and dozens of Global Capability Centres — the large enterprise back-office operations that are reshaping flex demand particularly in India and Southeast Asia.
Opportunity or threat?
For building owners and asset managers, flex memberships are simultaneously the opportunity and the threat. The opportunity lies in the foot traffic generated from membership-based spaces, along with vibrancy, and revenue from floors that might otherwise sit underutilised. Flex members act as a feeder pipeline: individuals on hot desks frequently upgrade to dedicated desks, then to small team offices, then to private suites — each step representing a longer commitment and higher revenue per square metre. A well-structured flex floor also pulls meeting room, event space, and F&B revenue through the rest of the building.
The threat finds the income stream primarily accessible to buildings that are actually set up to deliver it. Memberships demand professional reception, booking platforms that work, flexible space configurations, marketing that produces a consistent pipeline of new members, and hospitality-grade community management. This is not passive income. It is a hospitality business with real estate characteristics, and it cannot be bolted on as an afterthought.
The smartest landlords are now building flex into their tenant mix as a deliberate strategy. They price memberships to complement their private office and meeting room inventory. They use flex access to fill off-peak capacity. They track conversion rates from casual membership to longer-term commitments as a leading indicator of future lease demand. And they increasingly partner with specialist operators under management agreements rather than head leases, to capture the revenue upside without the operational complexity or counterparty risk.
The product evolution to watch
A few features of the market are moving faster than the headline numbers suggest:
- Multi-location access passes are becoming standard.
Most serious operators now offer some form of network membership. Hubble, Gable, and Desana are building software layers that aggregate access across multiple independent operators — a model that looks less like a coworking product and more like a corporate travel booking tool, applied to desks. - Corporate credit programs are one of the fastest-growing segments.
Rather than contracting office space, enterprises buy bulk membership credits that employees draw down across a network. It shifts the spend from real estate to operating expense and dramatically simplifies administrative overhead for distributed teams. - The “Core + Flex” strategy is now the default enterprise framework.
Cushman & Wakefield’s 2025 research confirms this has moved from experimental to mainstream: corporates maintain a core staffed HQ and supplement with flex in satellite markets, new markets, and near-employee-home locations. The model cuts real estate commitment by 30–50% while improving employee experience on hybrid commutes. - Suburban and fringe demand is accelerating faster than CBD demand.
This is a structural shift driven by the hub-and-spoke model described above. In Australia, Rubberdesk’s Q3 2025 data shows the strongest growth in small-team suites (1–10 person offices) rather than large enterprise floors, and the fastest rate growth in markets adjacent to, rather than inside, major CBDs.
What comes next
Flex membership is increasingly becoming the default first step into professional workspace — and for a growing population of users, including enterprise users, the only workspace category they engage with at all.
For landlords, the strategic question is no longer “whether” to incorporate flex into the asset, but “how” — through which structure, with which operator, at which point on the spectrum from light-touch amenity to full floor-plate operation. JLL’s projection finds that up to 30% of all office space could be flexible by 2030. This is not an aggressive forecast; it is the trajectory the current numbers are already drawing.
The lease isn’t dead, it just isn’t the only product in the building — and the buildings that can’t offer a membership alongside a lease are already starting to show it on the leasing board.
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Sources and further reading
– Workthere, *Flexmark Operator Survey*, fifth edition, 2025
– JLL, *Future of Work Survey*
– Spaces to Places, *UK Flex Office Market 2025*
– Rubberdesk, *Australian Flexible Office Market Report Q3 2025*
– OfficeRnD, *FlexIndex Report Q2 2025*
– Cushman & Wakefield, *Global Flexible Office Trends 2025*
– CBRE, *Flex Office Strategy and Enterprise Adoption*, 2025
– Allwork.Space, *London’s Office Recovery Is Real, But Highly Selective*, February 2026
– Gable, *WeWork Alternatives: The Full Guide to Flexible Workspaces in 2026*
– Savills, UK office take-up data
– BNP Paribas Real Estate, UK office take-up 2024
– Standard Chartered / IWG global agreement, 2021
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*This is part of an ongoing series on the operational and financial dynamics of flexible workspace.
