Over the past few years, one word has become almost impossible to avoid in commercial real estate: community. Every new office concept comes with a community manager, community events and community-driven spaces. Walk through any modern business hub in Amsterdam, Rotterdam or Utrecht and you'll see it plastered on the walls, embedded in the branding, woven into the pitch. At some point I started asking myself a question that felt almost too simple: what do we actually mean by community? And more importantly: does it deliver anything real for the entrepreneurs who pay for it?
From Square Metres to Shared Experience
The shift in how we think about office space has been gradual but significant. For decades, commercial real estate was a fairly straightforward transaction: you needed space, you signed a lease, you got square metres, desks and meeting rooms. What happened inside those walls was your business, not the landlord's.
That model has changed. Hybrid working patterns, a generation of employees who need a genuine reason to commute, and the rise of flexible office formats have pushed the market towards something harder to define. Office space is increasingly framed around experience, encounter, network and collaboration. Landlords and operators are no longer just selling a location, they're selling a context.
Which is where the word community enters the room and refuses to leave.
What Actually Makes Something a Community?
Let me be precise here, because I think the word gets stretched until it means almost nothing. A community is not a group of people who happen to share a building. A building with two hundred tenants is not automatically a community, it's just a building with two hundred tenants.
A real community has a few defining characteristics:
- Shared interests or goals among its members
- Genuine interaction: people actually talking to each other
- Knowledge exchange that flows in multiple directions
- A sense of mutual investment: people who care whether others succeed
- Continuity: relationships that persist beyond a single event
The difference matters. A company that moves into a office space in Rotterdam and shares a reception with forty other firms is not automatically joining a community. It becomes one only if there is genuine connection between those firms, and that connection does not emerge from a shared postcode.
Why Does Community Fit So Well Into the Real Estate Pitch?
From a landlord's perspective, the logic is clear. If your building can offer more than space, if tenants gain access to a network, to events, to collaboration opportunities, then you have a competitive advantage that goes beyond price per square metre. A strong community narrative can justify higher rents, reduce vacancy and increase tenant retention. Operators of flexible office formats have understood this for years.
There is also a genuine structural reason why the concept has traction. Hybrid working has fundamentally altered why people come to the office. Employees who can work perfectly well from home need a different kind of pull. If the office is simply a quieter place to do what you could do at your kitchen table, it struggles to compete. But if it offers connection, spontaneous conversations, access to people you would not otherwise meet, that is a different proposition entirely.
The office, in this framework, becomes a cultural asset rather than a functional one. That is a legitimate observation about how workplace behaviour has changed. The question is whether operators are genuinely delivering that, or simply borrowing the language.
When the Community Story Is Mostly Marketing
Here is where I want to be honest, because I think the critical version of this story gets told less often than the promotional one.
I have seen buildings labelled as communities where the entire programme consists of a drinks reception once a month and a Slack channel nobody uses. I have visited flex spaces where every tenant is working silently behind their own laptop, earphones in, with no meaningful interaction with anyone around them. I have spoken to entrepreneurs who selected a location partly because of the community promise and felt, six months in, that they had simply paid a premium for something that existed mainly in the brochure.
Is a free Friday afternoon drink enough to turn a building into a community? My honest answer is no. Events can create the conditions for connection, but they cannot manufacture it. A community emerges from people who genuinely want to engage with each other, have something in common worth sharing, and keep doing so over time. You cannot put that on an events calendar.
"A community is not a product you can sell. It is something you have to build, and that takes time, intention and the right people in the room."
So Who Actually Benefits?
I asked myself a specific question as part of this investigation: if I were starting a company tomorrow, would I choose an office with a community concept?
My answer depends entirely on what stage the business is at and what it needs. For a solo founder or a small team without an existing network, the potential upside is real. A well-run community can accelerate the process of building professional relationships: meeting potential partners, early customers or advisors that would otherwise take years to find through conventional channels. For someone who is genuinely isolated in the early stages of building something, that social infrastructure has concrete value.
The calculation looks different for a team of thirty with an established client base, clear internal culture and a need for focused, uninterrupted work. For that business, the community framing might be a distraction, or worse, a cost driver. Not every entrepreneur is looking for social interaction during the working day. Some need privacy, quiet, and a space that projects stability to clients and partners.
There are also meaningful distinctions between types of communities worth acknowledging:
- Entrepreneur communities: broad ecosystems for startups and freelancers focused on growth and network
- Sector communities: spaces clustered around a specific industry such as technology, sustainability or creative sectors, where tenants genuinely strengthen each other
- Building communities: all tenants share a location, with varying levels of actual connection between them
The sector community is arguably the most valuable format, because shared professional context gives people a reason to engage beyond proximity. If you rent office space in Amsterdam in a building full of tech companies, and you are a tech company yourself, the overlap is natural. The connections that emerge from that context tend to be more substantive than those from a mixed-use building where the only common thread is the building itself.
What Does a Good Real Estate Community Actually Look Like?
After looking at this from several angles, I think there are a few markers that distinguish a genuine community from a well-packaged marketing story:
- A clearly defined audience: not everyone, but a specific type of tenant with shared characteristics
- Active, consistent facilitation: not just events, but someone whose job it is to make connections happen
- Physical spaces designed for spontaneous encounter, not just heads-down work
- Tenants who have been there long enough to know each other
- Evidence of real collaboration between tenants: referrals, joint projects, shared resources
The absence of any of those elements should prompt a sceptical question or two before signing a lease based on community as a selling point.
Can Technology Strengthen Community, or Replace It?
As someone who works at the intersection of technology and real estate, I find this question genuinely interesting. Platforms, apps and digital tools can support community: tenant apps that facilitate introductions, platforms that surface relevant events, matchmaking tools that connect complementary businesses. These are real and useful instruments.
But technology can only support what people are willing to do themselves. It cannot generate genuine interest in another person's business. It cannot manufacture the moment when two founders realise they are solving adjacent problems and decide to collaborate. Those moments emerge from human behaviour, not software architecture.
If the underlying culture of a building is one of isolated working, no app will change that. Technology is a multiplier: it amplifies what is already there. In a strong community, it can accelerate connection. In a weak one, it just adds another channel nobody uses. This mirrors something we think about constantly at RE-SEARCH: data and tools open doors, but the substance of what happens behind those doors depends on people. For a broader look at how this thinking applies to our platform, this piece on why AI alone is not enough in commercial real estate covers the same tension in a different context.
A Genuine Conclusion, Not a Comfortable One
After this investigation, which has been more of a structured curiosity than a formal study, my conclusion is nuanced. Community in commercial real estate is neither a universally valuable offering nor a pure marketing fiction. It sits somewhere in between, and where exactly depends on the quality of execution and the specific needs of the tenant.
For some entrepreneurs, a well-run community is among the most valuable things their office address can offer. For others, what matters far more is good transport links, reliable infrastructure, a professional environment and a lease that makes sense. Both of those are legitimate requirements, and neither is more sophisticated than the other.
What I object to is the uncritical use of the word as though its presence in a brochure is sufficient proof of its existence in practice. If you are evaluating office space and the community pitch is part of the appeal, ask the hard questions. Talk to current tenants. Ask what has actually come from the community: not what is planned, but what has happened. The answers will tell you more than the marketing ever will.
At RE-SEARCH, we believe that the right commercial space is about more than the room itself. It is about the environment in which a business can actually grow: the people, the infrastructure, the location and yes, sometimes, the community around it. That is why we look beyond square metres. Whether you are searching for office space in Utrecht, exploring flexible office versus fixed lease options, or simply trying to understand what you are actually buying when a landlord mentions community, the question worth asking is always the same: does this genuinely serve my business, or does it mainly serve the pitch?
