3 Reasons Shared Amenities Don’t Pay Off (Yet) & What to Do About It

Shared amenities attract hybrid tenants. But do they generate ROI? Here are three reasons they often don’t and how to turn them into profit drivers.

It’s no secret that tenant expectations have changed. Whether they’re signing a two-month coworking contract or committing to a long-term lease, they’re not just touring “office space”, they’re evaluating the full hybrid experience. Good-looking lounges, shared meeting rooms, phone booths, connected services, and Instagrammable coffee bars are no longer extras. They’re part of the decision criteria. Especially when that tenant needs to lure employees back and third of them are Gen Z.

But here’s the challenge: those beautiful shared amenities aren’t free. Operators and asset managers still have to fund the build, absorb the furnishing cost, and dedicate square metres to space that can’t be leased privately. These “extensions”, communal meeting rooms, event spaces, team pods  often don’t count towards net rentable area (NRA), which is what drives leasing revenue and NOI. That’s reason one: you’re building amenities to attract tenants, but you’re not tracking or monetising how they’re used.

1. Reason two: tenants now treat shared amenities as an extension of their lease, booking six desks for Monday and Tuesday, then using meeting rooms or project pods midweek. But most landlords still treat amenities as fixed “nice-to-haves,” bundled into long-term contracts with no dynamic pricing or usage-based models. The result? Tenants flex, but buildings can’t  and operators miss the chance to capture value.
2. Then there’s reason three: no operational layer to make these spaces turn and generate income. Most operators and property management teams don’t have extra staff to run micro-bookings or chase down usage logs. And the on-site experience? It has to be frictionless, because no one has time to explain how to “log into the portal” just to use a room. Without self-service systems in place, even the best-designed amenities become friction points.
3. That’s where smart amenity tech comes in. If your tenants want to flex up on Wednesday and Thursday, the building needs to flex with them. Shared spaces and meeting rooms and breakout spaces become on-demand extensions of their lease, but only if they’re easy to book, easy to access, and easy to monitor. That means removing logins, ditching QR chaos, and using automated shared office amenity systems that just work. Think: tap to book, tap to enter, automatic billing, real-time visibility. No staff needed.

Next week, we’ll be digging into the ROI side of this with a free calculator that shows what shared amenities can actually generate when managed with purpose-built solutions like elumo. But the truth is simple: in the era of hybrid work, shared spaces are no longer a luxury. They’re a cost centre waiting to become a profit engine if you remove the friction and let them flex.

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