Most community venues and council-run facilities have rooms that sit idle for large parts of the week: boardrooms used for one meeting a month, training rooms booked only in school terms, desks and offices used by a fraction of the staff they were built for. That unused capacity has a cost, even when no one's actively using the space.
This post looks at the case for sharing that spare capacity with the wider community, and what it actually returns for the venue.
Every room a venue maintains costs money whether it's booked or not: utilities, cleaning, insurance and maintenance don't scale down because a room sits empty three days a week. Sharing that spare capacity turns a fixed cost into a source of income, without requiring new construction or a lease change. SpacetoCo's work with local government councils on flexible asset management covers this shift in more depth, particularly for councils managing a mix of centrally run and externally managed properties.
Activity-based working has already normalised this shift inside many organisations, where desks and meeting rooms are shared rather than assigned. The same logic extends naturally to a wider community audience: if a boardroom is unused most afternoons, opening it to local businesses, startups or community groups puts that capacity to work instead of leaving it idle.
For a council or community venue with a defined booking system in place, the return from space sharing tends to come from small, frequent bookings rather than large one-off contracts. A training room hired for two hours by a local business, a meeting room booked weekly by a community group, or a hall hired for a Saturday workshop all add up. SpacetoCo's research into unlocking new revenue for local government areas breaks down what this looks like in practice for councils managing multiple facilities.
Calculating whether a space is priced sensibly is straightforward:
Venues that price too high for the local market tend to get very few bookings; venues that price sensibly and make availability easy to check online tend to fill spare hours consistently.
Beyond the financial return, sharing space brings new people into a venue who wouldn't otherwise have a reason to visit. A startup using a meeting room for a pitch, a business coach running a two-day workshop, or a local group hiring a hall regularly all create informal opportunities for the venue to build relationships it wouldn't have access to otherwise.
For councils in particular, this has a secondary benefit: increased foot traffic to a civic building supports the case for continued community investment in that building, and creates goodwill that's harder to build through programming alone.
The main barrier councils and venues raise isn't whether space sharing works, it's whether managing it will create more administrative work than it's worth. This becomes even more pressing during periods of organisational change: councils going through amalgamation often find venue hire is one of the first systems to break down if it isn't consolidated properly.
An online booking platform designed for this removes most of that manual load: availability, pricing and payment happen automatically once set up, freeing staff to focus on the bookings that need a real decision. SpacetoCo's booking and marketplace platform is built specifically for councils and community venues managing exactly this kind of shared space.
Does sharing space actually generate meaningful income for a community venue?
Yes, particularly for spaces already sitting idle outside peak hours. Small, frequent bookings such as a two-hour meeting room hire or a weekly community group booking add up over a year, and the marginal cost of hosting them is low since the space's fixed costs (utilities, insurance) are already being paid.
What kind of spaces are worth sharing first?
Spaces with clear idle hours and low setup requirements tend to work best as a starting point: boardrooms, training rooms and halls that already exist and don't need modification. More specialised spaces, like commercial kitchens, can follow once the booking process is established.
How does a venue avoid space sharing becoming extra admin work?
By using a booking platform that automates availability, pricing and payment rather than managing enquiries manually. This is the difference between space sharing adding a genuine income stream and it becoming an unmanageable side project for already-stretched staff.
Sharing space isn't just a way to fill a spare room, it's a way to turn a cost a venue is already carrying into income and community connection. The financial case is straightforward once idle hours are accounted for, and the relationship benefits, new local contacts, repeat community use, goodwill toward the venue, tend to compound over time. The barrier most venues actually face is administrative, not strategic, and that's solvable with the right booking system in place.
Download SpacetoCo's practical guide for moving community spaces online.