Introduction

Thinkspace has been part of Seattle’s tech ecosystem since before “coworking” was a household word. Founded by Peter Chee in April 2008, Thinkspace was one of the very first coworking companies in the Seattle area, opening its doors years before the category exploded into the mainstream.

Eighteen years and two thriving locations later — one in Redmond, one in Seattle — Chee made a defining strategic bet: position Thinkspace not just as a place where startups and tech companies work, but as a brand that is simultaneously AI native and deeply human.

“We should embrace AI and also embrace that we are deeply human,” Chee explains. “That’s how we’re differentiated — because of how deeply human we are with our customers, while at the same time fully embracing the AI native side of things and rebuilding our entire systems and infrastructure.”

That kind of repositioning is easy to state and hard to execute. It meant Thinkspace couldn’t just talk about being AI native, its backend, its data and its member experience needed to actually work that way. That transformation started with rebuilding its operations on Yardi Kube, the software now running the business.

The challenge: managing coworking growth without an integrated system

Like most companies that launch lean, Thinkspace started with the tools that were free and familiar: QuickBooks, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and spreadsheets standing in for a full CRM.

“Pretty much our CRM, and all of our ways of tracking information, was all done inside spreadsheets,” Chee says. “It’s fine when you’re first starting out…but then as you start to grow and you get 100 customers, it suddenly becomes an issue. And as you get 500, 1,000 customers, it becomes really painful if you don’t have good systems in place.”

The pain points were structural, not cosmetic:

• Fragmented systems. Membership tracking, billing and bookings lived in disconnected spreadsheets and point tools rather than one platform.
• No integrated view of the property side. Thinkspace doesn’t just run a coworking operating company, it also owns a commercial building. Chee needed one ecosystem that could serve both the coworking business and the property management side and generic coworking software couldn’t do that.
• Manual, admin-heavy growth. As Thinkspace scaled its membership types — from virtual offices to custom suites to hourly meeting rooms — every new package and promotion added administrative overhead without a system built to manage variety at scale.
• Limited visibility into secondary revenue. Thinkspace could easily see whether coworking memberships were full but had far less insight into how much revenue meeting rooms were actually generating.

Thinkspace evaluated other coworking-specific platforms first, but while some were serviceable, none solved the full picture.

The solution: how Yardi Kube unified coworking and property management

Thinkspace moved its operations onto Yardi Kube, and the deciding factor wasn’t a single feature, it was the fact that Kube lives inside the broader Yardi ecosystem, alongside Yardi Voyager for property management.

“Yardi is not just coworking software — it also has Yardi Voyager, and we own a commercial building,” Chee says. “Having the ability to use the same system, the same company, to provide that software was critical for me, and was the primary reason we made that shift.” Chee describes Yardi as “the gold standard for managing property” based on what he’s seen across the industry — a rare case where the coworking platform and the property management platform aren’t just compatible, but built by the same company.

Once implemented, several capabilities became core to how Thinkspace runs day to day:

• Self-service booking. Prospects and members can book coworking offices, meeting rooms, event space and Thinkspace’s podcast studio directly through the portal — on their own schedule.
• Flexible product and pricing management. Virtual offices, suites and hourly meeting rooms can all be packaged, discounted, and promoted within the system, with performance tracked by package.
• Integrated billing. Members interact with billing every month, and it has become one of the most reliable, low-friction parts of the platform.
• E-commerce. Chee calls out Kube’s e-commerce integration as notably stronger than what he saw in competing coworking platforms.
• Reporting and analytics. Monthly reports on occupancy and meeting room utilization give Thinkspace a data layer it didn’t have before.
• A single source of truth. Core customer and operational data lives in Yardi, creating a system of record that other tools and internal applications can build on through Yardi’s API.

Implementation wasn’t just about turning on new software — it was also about building on top of it.

“Because Yardi has such a strong API, we’re able to create additional systems that build and enrich the data that’s already inside Yardi,” Chee says. “That’s the whole point of AI — the ability to take your data and enrich it with information you wouldn’t normally have the time or technical expertise to generate.”

The one recurring friction point Chee flags candidly: third-party integrations outside the Yardi ecosystem that touch billing data have occasionally been “a little sticky” — a contrast he draws specifically to highlight how smoothly the native Yardi systems work by comparison.

The result: 96% occupancy and a single source of truth

Thinkspace today operates two locations at 96% occupancy with 600+ members — and a set of operational and strategic gains that trace directly back to its Yardi Kube implementation.

Lead capture built for how founders work. Self-service booking has changed how Thinkspace converts prospects, particularly outside standard business hours. “Self-service is a big deal when entrepreneurs and startup people work evenings, weekends, and hours when the team isn’t necessarily around,” Chee says. “Having a strong platform that allows them to do that themselves is really important for us.”

A new revenue lens. Reporting inside Kube has surfaced an opportunity that had been hiding in plain sight. “The meeting room revenue is actually pretty significant, too — but not having great data in the past hasn’t allowed us to really understand it as well,” Chee says. With clearer utilization data now available, Thinkspace is directing more marketing energy toward meeting rooms — a category it had historically underweighted in favor of core memberships.

A foundation for AI-native growth. Perhaps the most strategic result isn’t a single metric — it’s that Yardi Kube’s API has become the data backbone supporting Thinkspace‘s broader AI-native repositioning.

“Yardi is the backbone behind all of the customer information. It’s the single source of truth,” Chee says.

Conclusion: choosing software that grows with your coworking business

Thinkspace’s story is a useful one for any operator who feels boxed in by the tools that got them started. Spreadsheets and point solutions can carry a coworking business through its earliest years, but they buckle under real growth — and they can’t bridge the gap between running a coworking brand and managing the commercial property underneath it.

By consolidating onto Yardi Kube and Yardi Voyager, Thinkspace gained more than a booking and billing system, it gained the connected data foundation its AI-native brand identity depends on. The takeaway for other operators: the right platform decision isn’t just about which software has the most coworking-specific features today. It’s about which partner can support the operating business, the property side, and whatever comes next, all from the same source of truth.

As Chee puts it, reflecting on what’s ahead: “It’s all about data, right? And AI loves data.” For Thinkspace, that data is finally living in one place, ready to be built on.