Why Flex Workspace Brokers Spend Most of Their Week on Admin — and How to Change It

Talk to any experienced flexible workspace broker about how their week breaks down and you’ll get roughly the same answer: about two-thirds of it is admin.

Email distributions to thirty operators per brief. Searching listings platforms. Cross-referencing availability across three different channels that don’t talk to each other. Verification calls for every option before it goes to the client. Two hours of PowerPoint to build a shortlist presentation. More calls to schedule viewings. Then starting again with the next brief.

This isn’t a complaint from an unusually organised broker with time to count hours. It comes up consistently — across different firms, different deal volumes, different years of market experience. The workflow is the workflow. The question is why it looks the way it does, and whether it has to.

The tooling is the wrong shape

Most CRE software has been built on the assumption that operators publish listings and brokers — or tenants — search through them. It’s a sensible model if you’re an occupier looking to browse options at your own pace. It’s the same model that produced Rightmove, Booking.com, and most of the search-driven platforms we use in everyday life.

But it’s the wrong shape for how brokers actually work.

Brokers don’t search. They respond to client briefs. The trigger is a specific requirement with specific parameters that lands in their inbox — a client who needs 15 desks in Shoreditch, a six-month break clause, under £9,000 a month, available from October. The work begins with a brief, not a search.

That’s a fundamentally different workflow. Search-based tooling assumes inventory comes first and the requirement emerges from browsing. Brief-driven work assumes the requirement comes first and the market is queried against it. These are not the same thing run in reverse — they require different tools entirely.

Brokers don’t search. They respond to client briefs. The trigger is a requirement, not a desire to browse the market — and no amount of better filters changes that.

The result of applying search-based tooling to brief-driven work is manual translation at every step. The broker takes a structured client requirement, decomposes it into platform search filters, runs multiple searches across multiple platforms, exports results, and then manually reassembles a picture of the market from the outputs. Every handoff requires human intervention. Much of the time a broker would have been faster starting from their contact list.

Industry research consistently reflects this. Brokers report ongoing friction around rigid workflows, slow processes, and limited automation — not because they lack market knowledge, but because the tools they have don’t fit the shape of the work they do.

What it costs

The admin burden shows up in three places.

Time. A single managed workspace brief — sourcing, chasing, verifying, and presenting — typically consumes one to two full working days. A broker managing four or five active briefs simultaneously spends the majority of their week on process rather than client conversations. The ratio of workflow to actual brokerage work tilts in the wrong direction as deal volume grows.

Lost deals. The verification calls — a significant portion of the workflow — exist because listed data is stale. A space shown as available on a platform may have been let last week. A spreadsheet emailed by an operator last month may no longer reflect current stock. So before anything goes to the client, the broker phones to confirm.

The problem with this is what gets filtered out. Operators whose sales teams don’t pick up the phone don’t make the shortlist — regardless of whether their space would have been the best fit. The client ends up with fewer options than the market warrants, because the verification process filters for accessibility of the operator’s sales function, not quality of the space. Options fall out. Deals don’t happen that should have.

Verification filters for accessibility of the operator’s sales team, not quality of the space. The best option and the option that answers the phone are not always the same.

Client experience. The broker’s value is their knowledge of the market: which operators are likely to respond well to a particular brief, which spaces are genuinely flexible on term, which operators have a track record of converting to closed deals. That expertise is what a client is paying for. Every hour spent manually reformatting PDFs into a PowerPoint is an hour not spent on that. By the time the deck goes out, the broker has spent more of their cognitive energy on logistics than on advice.

The operator side

Chris Connell and I co-founded Future Spaces in 2019, a managed workspace operator. We saw the same friction from the supply side.

A broker brief arrives — usually as a free-text email, sometimes with a document attached, occasionally with something that approximates a consistent structure. We check fit against our current availability, pull floor plans, draft a response in our own format, and send it back. Then we wait: to hear whether the brief is still live, whether the client has already committed elsewhere, whether the requirement has changed since the email was sent.

The broker is running the same uncertainty in reverse. They’ve sent thirty emails and are waiting on thirty separate threads, in thirty different formats, with no guarantee the availability information is current by the time it arrives.

What this means in practice is that every operator on the supply side is absorbing response costs at a rate that makes no sense relative to conversion. Time spent responding to briefs that were already closed, or that were speculative rather than live, or where the broker’s client had already moved on — all of that is friction the current model distributes across the whole market rather than eliminating at source.

What Great Space does differently

Great Space is built around the brief as the unit of work, not the search.

A broker submits a structured requirement once — location, desk count, budget, term, start date, any specific requirements. That brief goes to 150+ verified operators simultaneously, via a single action that takes under 30 seconds. Operators respond inside the platform in a consistent format: available spaces, current pricing, photos, terms, availability date.

On live briefs, operators on Great Space respond in a median of under two hours from submission — compared to 24–72 hours across the traditional multi-channel process, before accounting for the time spent chasing non-responses. The shortlist assembles automatically from those responses. The client presentation — a branded, shareable document — is ready within hours, not at the end of a two-day cycle.

The sourcing workflow that currently takes a broker a full working day compresses to roughly an hour. That’s not a marginal improvement in the same process; it’s a different process, built for the actual shape of the work.

The operator experience changes proportionally. Briefs arrive with full structure: location, capacity, budget, term. Operators respond once, in a standard format, and the response flows directly into the broker’s shortlist. No follow-up calls to clarify what was meant by the brief. No chasing for confirmation that a response was received. The response cost drops significantly on both sides.

Commission tracking is also built in. When a deal closes, the agreed terms are recorded in the platform and payment milestones are flagged automatically — replacing the separate commission-chasing process that currently sits alongside the sourcing workflow.

The market picture

UK managed workspace supply has expanded significantly since 2019 — by some industry estimates, by around 895% over that period. More operators, more spaces, more deal variants, more briefs. The volume of market information a broker needs to stay across has grown dramatically while the tools for processing it have stayed largely the same.

Elsewhere in real estate, the shift is already visible. According to the 2026 PwC and Urban Land Institute Emerging Trends in Real Estate Europe report, 75% of real estate leaders are now using AI in their operations — up from 51% the prior year. Adjacent industries (travel, recruitment, financial services) have rebuilt their intermediary workflows around structured data exchange. The broker who can submit a structured requirement and receive structured responses in a shared format is operating in a different market from one who can’t.

Flex and managed workspace brokerage is late to this. Not because the problem is harder, but because the market has lacked the critical mass of structured operator data needed to make it work. That’s the gap we’re closing.

If you’re a UK broker managing flex or managed workspace briefs, start free on Great Space. The core referral and matching workflow has no cost. Operators always receive and respond to referrals for free.