Start with what actually breaks

Before looking at any product, write down the five things that went wrong in your building last month. Not categories — actual incidents.

A tenancy that rolled because nobody spotted the notice deadline. A contractor invoice nobody could match to a job. A cleaner who says the second floor was done and a tenant who says it wasn't. A meeting room double-booked. An EICR that expired three weeks ago.

That list is your specification. Every demo you sit through should be judged against it, because a platform that handles four of the five is worth more than one with a longer feature list that handles two.

The pricing model matters more than the price

There are three common shapes in this market, and they behave very differently as you grow.

Per member or per desk. The most common. It looks cheap at 40% occupancy and expensive at 90% — which is to say, it costs you most in the month you have been working towards. Model it at full occupancy before you sign, not at today's number.

Commission on room hire. Some platforms take a percentage of what you earn from bookings. If you push meeting-room revenue hard, this can quietly become your largest software cost, and it scales precisely with your best work.

Flat monthly fee. Predictable, and the number does not change when you fill the building.

Ask any vendor what your bill looks like at full occupancy with double your current room-hire income. The answer is more informative than the headline price.

Modules included, or modules sold

A long feature list is not the same as a working platform. Ask specifically:

  • Which of these are included on the tier I would actually buy?
  • Which are add-ons, and what do they cost?
  • Which are on the roadmap rather than built?

That last question is the one worth pressing. Plenty of software is sold on functionality that exists as a design. Ask to see it working on a real account, not in a demo environment.

We try to answer it before you ask: WorkHub's public roadmap says what is planned and what has shipped, and visitor management and telephony are labelled as not built because they are not built.

Does the data actually connect?

This is the difference between a suite and a platform, and it is hard to see in a demo.

Ask the vendor to show you a maintenance ticket, then click through from that ticket to the tenant, from the tenant to their tenancy, and from the tenancy to what they are invoiced. If each step is a separate search in a separate module, the products are stitched together rather than connected, and every cross-module question will be manual work forever.

The test question: *how many clicks from a ticket to what that tenant is paying?*

Questions that expose a bad fit

Use these in a demo. They are hard to answer with a slide.

  1. Show me a tenancy renewing in three months, and what happens if nobody touches it.
  2. Show me what the cleaner sees on their phone, not what the manager sees.
  3. Show me a room bookable to the public at one price and to tenants at another.
  4. Show me last quarter's maintenance spend broken down by contractor.
  5. Show me what a tenant sees when they raise a ticket — including whose brand is on it.
  6. Show me what happens to an invoice raised here once it reaches my accounting system.
  7. What happens to my data if I leave?

Coworking software, serviced office software, or neither

Most platforms in this market grew out of coworking: per-member pricing, community feeds, hot desks, day passes. If you let offices on tenancy agreements — with leases, renewals, keys, contractors and compliance — that shape does not fit, and you will spend the contract working around it.

The reverse is also true. If you run a genuine community-led coworking space and want member directories and event feeds, a building-operations platform will feel cold.

Be honest about which business you are in. It eliminates most of the shortlist immediately.

Implementation is the real risk

Software rarely fails at the demo. It fails at migration, when it turns out nobody has time to load 300 contacts, 40 tenancies and a key register while also running the building.

Ask what onboarding actually includes, whether data migration is assisted, and how long a comparable operator took to go live. A tool nobody finishes setting up is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced, because now you have both.

What to do next

If your building lets offices on tenancy agreements, start with business centre management software. If you run desks and memberships, start with coworking management software. Running both, or more than one building, see flexible workspace and multi-site.

WorkHub is pre-launch and taking early-access enquiries. If the questions above rule us out, we would rather tell you now.