While I was building a full training on this product for our Community Manager University members, I went looking for outside examples to point to, and there weren’t many. IWG and the other big national players sell this hard, but independent or boutique operators doing it well are rare. That’s the subject of this episode of the Everything Coworking podcast, “The Most Underused Coworking Product That Can Double Office Revenue,” the second in this summer’s series on adding revenue to your coworking business.
This article is the written companion to that episode. It covers what a part-time private office actually is, the math behind why it works, who buys it, and what it takes to build it right.
Why your best office is probably sitting half empty
Here’s a scenario I run into constantly. You never want to run a space at full capacity, and you shouldn’t model for 100% occupancy. If you’re at 100% occupancy, your prices are too low. You should be modeling something closer to 95%, and even that’s hard to hit unless you designed your floor plan from scratch and built it to spec. More often, you end up with an office that doesn’t quite match demand at any given moment: an interior office nobody loves, or a four-person or five-person office when nobody happens to be looking for that exact size, or nobody’s willing to pay what you need to charge for it. That office just sits there, underperforming, and you need a solution.
The usual fix is to list it on a day office marketplace, light a candle, and hope somebody wanders in. Maybe a booking trickles in now and then. But that revenue is unpredictable, it doesn’t recur, and it doesn’t solve the real problem: you have a room that isn’t being used, and you need a way to sell it more than once.
This is exactly the product independent operators are leaving on the table: the part-time private office.
A part-time private office is not a day office
These two products get confused constantly, so let me be precise. A day office is transactional. Someone books it on demand, by the hour or by the day, at a fairly high rate, often somewhere around $25 an hour. It’s really just a meeting room that put on a blazer and started calling itself an office.
A part-time private office is a membership. The member buys a bucket of hours each month, or a set number of days each week, and reserves the office when they need it, the same way they’d reserve a meeting room. But they’re paying on a subscription basis, at something closer to $5 to $6 an hour, for a package that typically runs $200 to $300 a month depending on your market.
The word that matters here is recurring. It’s the word that lets you sleep at night instead of doing mental math on whether enough people wandered in this month.
The economics: why underutilization is the whole point
This works for the same reason your gym membership works out great, for the gym. People routinely pay for more than they use. Someone buys a full-time office and doesn’t show up every day. Someone buys a mail package with twenty meeting room credits and uses three, then keeps paying anyway because next month feels like the month they’ll actually use them. Almost nobody burns through the full value of what they’ve purchased.
This isn’t a flaw in human nature.
This is your business model.
A part-time private office takes that same pattern and turns it into a product you can actually sell. You can sell memberships into the same physical room to more than one person, because utilization never maxes out, and you end up generating meaningfully more revenue from that single office than you would from one full-time tenant.
Dan Wesson, who co-owns The Post Workspaces with Chelle Petersen, deserves the credit here. The two of them are the ones who really turned this into a recurring revenue product rather than just a fancier day office with better lighting. Dan has a rule: he wants to make at least two times what an office would generate as a standard full-time private office, or he won’t offer it, which is the kind of rule I wish more operators had the nerve to set.
During COVID, he was seeing three to four times that number. The multiplier has come down some since, but he’s still running at least double, across multiple offices.
Who actually buys this product
There’s a clear set of buyers for this, and most of them are people your current lineup is turning away without you ever finding out. They don’t send a note. They just go rent some cheap, chopped up office space instead, or cobble together an office share with someone they barely know.
Therapists
This is one of the fastest growing segments for coworking, but therapists face specific constraints. They need parking, a staffed entryway, and clients who aren’t hiking through a maze of open desks to reach a private room. A shocking number of therapists are working out of buildings with carpet that hasn’t been replaced since the Clinton administration, because the real estate that actually fits their needs is expensive.
Plenty are already informally splitting an office with a colleague by day of the week, essentially running their own janky version of this product with a shared calendar and a lot of goodwill. A part-time private office solves a problem they’ve already been solving badly on their own.
Attorneys, financial planners, and newer business owners
They want the privacy and the address, but they don’t have the client volume yet to justify $800 to $1,000 a month for a full-time office, and frankly shouldn’t be spending it if they did. What they can afford is $200 to $300 for guaranteed access when they need it.
Mercedes and Lee at Katy Elite Suites in Katy, Texas built a package that pairs a virtual address with private office hours, priced above a standard membership. It’s a smart bundle for exactly this buyer.
The member living in your phone booth
You know the one. They’ve got a coworking membership because they’re watching their budget, but they’ve annexed your phone booth as a personal office, complete with a phone charger permanently plugged in and a suspicious number of snacks. Or they’re squatting in a meeting room. Either way, open plan isn’t giving them the privacy they need, and everyone else in the space has feelings about it.
Kiersten, an operator in our Community Manager University program, described walking a member through this option after he told her he felt like he was living in the phone booth, which he basically was. He converted, and she doubled her monthly revenue on that single member, because his budget stretched further than a coworking membership even if it didn’t stretch all the way to a full-time office.
Why this fits the math from last week
Workspace revenue typically runs 60 to 70% of total revenue for a profitable operator, and within that, flex and coworking memberships usually account for only about 10%. That’s because people who can work happily in an open plan setting generally aren’t on the phone all day or stuck in back-to-back meetings, bless them.
Everyone else needs some form of privacy, and right now their only real options are a full-time office they’re not ready to commit to, or an expensive day office billed by the hour. The part-time private office fills that gap directly, and it does it inside a category, workspace revenue, that most operators already know how to sell.
What it takes to build this product right
- A dedicated landing page with online sign up. This is a lower price point product, so it needs to function like e-commerce, not a scavenger hunt. People should be able to buy it without picking up the phone, even if plenty still come in for a tour first.
- A deliberate choice of which office to launch it in. Don’t take your easiest-to-sell office and try to triple its revenue out of sheer optimism. Start with the office that’s been vacant for months because it’s a little too big or a little too interior. Your bar for success is low there. You’re not chasing market rate, you’re experimenting to see how much revenue you can pull out of an office that’s currently generating none.
- Patience while demand builds. Utilization takes time, the same way it does with meeting rooms. You will not hit two to three times standard office revenue in month one. Word of mouth has to build, and your team needs time to get comfortable talking about it and selling it without sounding like they’re reading off a card.
- Real training for your team, the same investment you’d make launching any other revenue line, not a five minute mention in a Monday huddle. They need to know how it works, how to talk about it, and how to close it.
- Visibility everywhere you already sell, your website, your Google Business Profile, your social channels, your sales funnel. If it’s buried under a dropdown menu like a family secret, it will not perform, no matter how good the product is.
Don’t wait to try it
Most operators who skip this product do it for one of two reasons. Either they assume it won’t work, or they try it, don’t see results in the first few weeks, and give up before demand has had a real chance to build — the coworking equivalent of quitting the gym on January 4th.
It’s a workspace product, which makes it feel low risk to launch, but it needs the same focus and marketing commitment as any other revenue line you’d build from scratch.
I’d rather see you pick the two vacant, awkward offices in your building and give this product ninety days of real effort than watch another one sit on a day office marketplace, waiting for someone’s assistant to book it at 4:45 on a Friday and never show up.
For the full audio breakdown, including more detail on how operators in our community are structuring this, listen to the full episode of the Everything Coworking podcast. If you’re already part of our Community Manager University program or operator membership, the pricing calculator I built for this product is waiting for you in your portal.
