The concept of flexible office is expanding. While there are some landlords that have expressed concern about signing long-term leases with flexible office providers like WeWork, others are embracing the concept as a building amenity. The most recent example is Brookfield Property Partners partnership with Convene, a flexible office provider that calls itself “workplace as a service.” Convene is unique in that it provides both highly designed flexible office space and tech-driven hospitality services—but perhaps most unique is that Convene partners directly with landlords to provide these services to existing tenants as well as Convene's clients. As the firm makes its foray into the Los Angeles market with its Brookfield partnership, we sat down with Ryan Simonetti, co-founder and CEO of Convene, to talk about the platform and how it's a peek inside the future of office space.

GlobeSt.com: Why is there such a high demand for flexible office space and office service platforms?

Ryan Simonetti: We are one of a few companies—obviously WeWork is the best known—that is really pioneering what we call workplace as a service. We believe that the way that people work has changed, and a lot of that is driven by technology and demographics. Today's companies are looking to consume their real estate flexibly, particularly because there is ore complexity today involved in running a company. The ability to have a real estate strategy that allows you to scale up and scale down in real time is relevant. That is different than the way the real estate market has traditionally run, which as you know is historically made up of 10-year leases. We are seeing that that trend is changing and most companies now want to consume part of their real estate strategy flexibly.