How to Refer Flex Office Clients: A Step-by-Step Guide for UK Brokers

Most brokers who come to workspace referrals for the first time treat them like a traditional commercial lease introduction. Find the requirement, shop it around the market, wait for the surveyor to do their thing, invoice somewhere down the line. That instinct is wrong, and it costs people deals. A workspace referral is faster, the brief is simpler, and the commission structure works differently. There are also distinct ways to get it wrong, most of them avoidable. What follows is the process I see working for the brokers who do this well, broken into the seven steps that matter.

Step 1: Qualify the requirement

Before you do anything else, work out whether this is a live requirement or an exploratory one. A client who has handed in notice on their current space and needs to be in somewhere new by quarter-end is a different animal to a founder idly wondering what 12 desks might cost. Both are worth your time. They are not worth the same amount of your time, and the order you do things in should reflect that.

Then settle the most important question: is this flex or managed? They behave nothing alike. Flex covers coworking and serviced offices, licensed and member-based, where the client moves into space that already exists. Managed is bespoke private office for a single occupier, where the operator takes the building and fits it out to the client’s specification, usually on a longer agreement. The whole shape of the deal changes depending on which one you’re running. If you’re not certain which the client actually needs, the flex vs managed guide walks through the distinction properly.

After that, three confirmations: desk count, budget, and timeline. Not “around 20-ish”, not “flexible on budget”, not “soon”. Actual numbers. And while you’re at it, draw out the non-negotiables. A private entrance, branding rights, parking, somewhere the client’s dog is welcome (more common a requirement than you’d think). These are the things that quietly disqualify half the market before you’ve sent a single brief, and far better to know them now than after three viewings.

Until those are confirmed, the brief isn’t ready to go anywhere. Resist the urge to start broadcasting just to feel productive.

Step 2: Build the brief

A complete brief contains six things: location, desk count, budget, term, start date, and the non-negotiables you flushed out in Step 1. That’s the whole list. It isn’t long, which is precisely why the gaps are so glaring when they appear.

The common mistakes are predictable. A vague location (“central London” is not a location; “within ten minutes’ walk of Liverpool Street” is). No budget, on the theory that leaving it open keeps options open, when in practice it just guarantees you a pile of irrelevant responses. “ASAP” as a start date, which tells the operator nothing they can plan around. And, most costly of all, leaving the flex-or-managed distinction unstated, so half your respondents are answering a different question to the one your client asked.

A complete brief isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the difference between an operator treating you as a serious source of business and treating you as noise to be triaged later.

Completeness matters because operators triage inbound on the quality of the information in front of them. A broker who sends a tight, fully-specified brief gets answered first. A broker who sends three lines and a question mark gets answered when someone has a spare moment, if at all. This is the single biggest lever you control, and most people leave it lying on the floor.

On Great Space, location, desk count, budget, term and start date are all required fields. You cannot send an incomplete brief, because the form won’t let you. It sounds like a small thing. It’s the difference between a brief that operators take seriously and one that sits at the bottom of an inbox.

Step 3: Identify the right operators

There’s a persistent belief that more is better, that the way to find the best deal is to put the requirement in front of as much of the market as possible. For workspace, this is mostly wrong, and it actively hurts you.

For a flex requirement, you typically want 3 to 10 operators with genuine stock in the area. There is no benefit to broadcasting to 30. The eleventh operator you contact either has nothing suitable or is so far down the relevance curve that their response will be noise. For managed, the numbers run a little higher, usually 5 to 15 depending on the market, because managed supply is more concentrated and you may need to cast slightly wider to find operators who’ll take on the fit-out for that particular spec.

The reason a targeted brief beats a mass broadcast isn’t just tidiness. Operators talk, and they remember the broker who keeps sending them requirements that have nothing to do with their estate. Relevance is reputation. Send the right brief to the right people and you become a source worth answering quickly; spray it everywhere and you become someone to filter out.

This is where structured data earns its keep. Because the Great Space brief is captured as proper fields rather than free text, the matching can do the targeting for you: the requirement goes to the operators in the network whose inventory actually fits, drawn from over 150 UK operators. You’re not guessing who has 15 desks near Liverpool Street. The system already knows.

Step 4: Manage responses

A good operator response answers your brief directly. Here are the units that match your desk count, here’s the price, here’s the term, here’s when it’s available, here are a couple of photos. A bad response is a generic brochure for the whole building and an invitation to “hop on a call to discuss”, which is a polite way of saying they haven’t read what you sent.

On response time, the traditional benchmark is grim: 24 to 72 hours is considered normal, and plenty of operators drift past that. Your client, meanwhile, is sitting on their hands wondering why their broker has gone quiet. On Great Space the median operator response is under two hours, which changes the conversation you can have with your client entirely.

Handle the no-responses pragmatically. One chase is reasonable. After that, move on, and make a private note that this operator is slow on the draw, useful intelligence for next time. Don’t let a silent operator hold up the whole requirement while your live client cools off.

Then build the shortlist. Aim for three to five comparable options, not ten. A client handed ten near-identical spaces doesn’t feel well served; they feel overwhelmed, and they push the decision back onto you, which defeats the point. A tight shortlist of genuinely good options is a stronger piece of work than an exhaustive one.

Step 5: Present to the client

What a client actually needs to make a decision is fairly modest: photos, the key details (desks, price, term, location), and your annotation. That last part is the bit only you can supply. The client can read a price list. What they’re paying you for is the line that says “this one’s the best value but the lift is temperamental” or “slightly over budget, but the only one with a private entrance you mentioned mattered”.

The trouble is the format. The way most brokers produce this is a PowerPoint, assembled by hand the night before, screenshotting listing photos, copying prices into a table, fiddling with alignment at eleven at night. It works, in the sense that a client receives something. It also eats an evening per requirement and looks, frankly, like it was built at eleven at night.

The annotation is the part a client is actually paying for. The formatting only feels like work.

On Great Space, the client presentation generates automatically from the responses you’ve shortlisted. The photos, details and pricing are already structured, so they assemble themselves into something presentable, and your time goes into the annotation — the part that carries your judgement, rather than the production. That’s the right division of labour.

Step 6: Arrange viewings

Viewings for managed workspace differ from coworking in a way that catches people out. With coworking, the space exists and the client can walk in tomorrow. With managed, you may be viewing a shell, or a comparable fit-out elsewhere, and you’ll need the operator to confirm fit-out timing and availability before anyone gets attached to a particular floor. Confirm what the client is actually viewing before you book it.

However you arrange it, keep the broker, client and operator in one thread rather than three separate email chains. The three-chain approach is how viewing times get crossed, how the client hears one availability and the operator quotes another, and how you end up as a switchboard relaying messages between two parties who could simply see the same thread.

During the viewing, note three things beyond the obvious: how responsive the operator’s representative is (it predicts how they’ll behave once the deal is done), how the space compares to its listing photos, and where the operator’s commercial flexibility sits. Those observations are worth more to your client than another set of photographs.

Step 7: Close and protect your commission

The deal is closed when the agreement is signed — a licence for flex, a management agreement for managed. Not when the client says they’re keen, not when they’ve “verbally committed”. Signed.

The single most important habit here is to agree your commission upfront, with the operator, before the requirement goes anywhere near them. Leaving it to the end is how brokers end up in awkward conversations after they’ve already delivered the value, negotiating from the weakest possible position. Most operators have a standard arrangement and will tell you what it is if you ask early. Ask early.

Then record the terms and track the payment, because workspace commissions often have a payment lag and it’s easy to lose sight of what’s owed across a busy pipeline. The mechanics of how these arrangements are structured, and the rates to expect, are covered in the commission guide. On Great Space, commission tracking is built into the pipeline, so the agreed terms and the payment status sit against the deal rather than in a spreadsheet you keep meaning to update. The broker–provider commission is also baked into the platform’s referral terms, which every party agrees to when they use the service. We’ve read through tens of commission and referral contracts to arrive at terms that protect both sides fairly, so the entitlement doesn’t rest on a side agreement you have to negotiate and enforce on every deal.

The shape of it

That’s the process in full: qualify, brief, target, manage, present, view, close. None of it is complicated. What makes it hard in practice is that the infrastructure has historically been yours to assemble by hand — the brief, the operator list, the chasing, the PowerPoint, the commission spreadsheet — every time. Great Space exists to take that infrastructure off your plate so the only thing left for you to do is the part that needs a broker: the judgement. For a full view of how referrals fit into the wider brokerage workflow, see the complete guide to flex workspace brokerage in the UK. If that sounds like the version of the job you’d rather be doing, start a free 30-day trial of Great Space.