LOS ANGELES—“I believe that in the next five years, office leasing will only happen online,” Mark Gilbreath, founder and CEO of LiquidSpace, said at the ALIS 2015 conference yesterday. He was on a panel of game changers in the hoteling and travel industry, discussing his new app LiquidSpace, which allows office owners to market unused space and lets on-the-go office users rent it.

“The traditional office leasing model is at odds with the new community,” said Gilbreath, whose LiquidSpace lives by the philosophy that “more people are leaving work to get work done.” LiquidSpace is designed to tap into a marketplace of used space, pairing landlords with temporary tenants, who are willing to pay by hour or day for a workspace. The app offers spaces for everything from private work desks to meeting rooms and intimate settings for interviews, and it recently partnered with Marriott hotels, which will offer—and capitalize—off of the unused business and meeting spaces inside the hotels. Potential temporary tenants can then book the space as they would a hotel room at the Marriott.  

This new style of office rentals is the next evolution in the sharing generation, and it affects the commercial real estate industry directly. “I changed something that would normally take six months and involve a broker to something that I can do in a minute with the tap of my thumb; that is disruptive to the industry,” he said on the panel. Other panelists included Carl Shepherd, co-founder of HomeAway and Jared Simon, co-founder of Hotel Tonight, which also have platforms that are disrupting the use of hotel space and hotel bookings.

This is the 14^th annual ALIS conference, which includes an award ceremony that honors the hotel industry's top companies and executives. The ALIS Awards for 2014 will be announced soon. Last year, the nominees spread across the industry, from Hyatt Place and the Fairfield Inn & Suites to Rockpoint Group.