We are trying to better manage our waitlist for office space and wondered if anyone had examples of policies that worked well (or that really didn’t work well) that they’d be willing to share. Currently, we aren’t charging to be added to a waitlist, but this means that everyone signs up whether or not their serious and weeding through the lists is time consuming when we need to re-fill a space. Do you charge to be on a waitlist? How long do you give prospects to affirm interest/sign lease before moving to the next person on the list?
Thanks @angel and @alex. We do that, and it does work great for dedicated desks and 1-desk offices. But we've got 60 offices that are 2,4,6 and 8-9 desks. Typically, our Commons members aren't looking for large spaces, and the professionals who are need at least some private, dedicated space - joining as Commons members doesn't work for them.
We've been adding these folks to waitlists by office size (and keeping in touch, inviting them to events, etc). Several lists were 20+ deep. This seemed to be a great indicator of interest and gave us confidence that we'd be able to refill offices if needed. Pretty quickly, that proved misleading: when offices open, we find ourselves scrambling through long lists; giving each person 48 hours to confirm can easily take a full month to find our new member - a very nerve-wracking thing when it's a bigger office.
We're considering a fee for non-members to be on a waitlist. If they take the office,it would go towards their membership.
Not sure how much that'll help...interested parties may have found other space in the interim... but we thought we'd try and wondered if anyone had any similar experience.
It certainly can’t hurt to try the pre-payment option to lock people into the waiting list, but I would be surprised if people bite for all of the same reasons you describe. If I’m running a team and need space for them, putting money down on an office I can’t have until some unknown point in the future isn’t a compelling offer, even when compared to a lesser offering that I can use now.
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One thing we have done with larger teams is introducing a longer cancellation period in order to get their deposit back. Basically once a team is >3, they represent a larger $$ liability for us and increased difficulty/stress in replacing that income with new members.
With larger groups we’ve had success negotiating 60 and 90 day notice windows that give us more time to fill in the gap naturally rather than scrambling. It’s no different (and at 60 days, even better) than they’d get with a traditional office lease, and realistically a large group almost always knows they are moving out at least 60 days in advance.
-Alex
The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.