Once upon a time, there was a hotel. It grew up to be a coworking space, among other things, and the path was hardly linear.
The Biltmore Hotel opened in Atlanta in 1924. For decades it was one of the city’s landmarks. Then, like so many grand old buildings, it declined.
It got converted to commercial office space in the late ‘90s, changed hands again in 2016 when the Georgia Tech Foundation purchased it, and then the pandemic did what the pandemic did to office buildings everywhere.
Occupancy fell to 70% vacant in a structure that is nearly 300,000 square feet. That is a lot of empty space.
The Georgia Tech Foundation started studying options. Georgia Tech president Dr. Ȧngel Cabrera traveled to Europe, where he visited innovation hubs in historic structures, all buzzing with startup energy. He came back with a vision: the building would become the Biltmore Innovation Center.
"We’re people first, not property first,” she states. “We’re building communities."
Julie is the kind of person who speaks in complete paragraphs, thinks three steps ahead, and genuinely believes that community and commerce belong in the same sentence.
Her background is unusual for commercial real estate: she spent six years on the leadership team at one of Atlanta’s most well-regarded coworking spaces. She understands, from the inside, what it takes to get a room of strangers to actually trust each other.
Almost immediately after taking over the Biltmore, Julie’s team started fielding leads that traditional commercial real estate simply could not accommodate. Startups. Early-stage companies. Venture capitalists who needed two desks and a fast internet connection, not a five-year lease and a credit check.
“They don’t know if they’re going to be alive in five months, let alone five years,” Julie says. “The commitment of time is unrealistic, and even if they were to sign a five-year lease, the likelihood of them making it to five years and being able to pay for all five years is very small.”
So they built Studio B.
They chose the 11th floor, which has some history of its own: WSB radio station broadcast from this space from 1925 to 1955. The radio towers on the roof still stand. Studio B and its tagline are named in part as a nod to that legacy: Begin. Build. Broadcast.
The buildout focused on what they were hearing from the market: fewer open-plan coworking seats, more private flexible offices and bookable meeting rooms. Phase one launched in August. Phase two just finished. Phase three is already being planned.
"Flexible office space is the current solution. It’s how you do it."
For commercial real estate professionals who are still trying to make the case for flex internally, Julie is clear: this is not a trend you can wait out.
The companies you want as tenants — the ones with growth trajectories, the ones that will someday need 10,000 square feet — often start as the ones who need three desks and no commitment. If you can’t serve them at that stage, someone else will.
Tech Square Atlanta is unusual. In a two-block radius, there are more than a dozen corporate innovation centers from names like Delta, The Home Depot, and International Paper. There are over 100 startups operating in various incubators and accelerators. Georgia Tech’s campus effectively runs up to the Biltmore’s front door.
That proximity is valuable, but it also creates a question: how do you build a relationship with a university without getting tangled up in all the things that make universities a challenge to move?
Julie’s answer is structural. Collaborative Real Estate was hired by the Georgia Tech Foundation, which is a separate legal entity from the university itself.
“I don’t work for the university,” she explains. “I work for a privately held company that’s been contracted by a university to do our work. But it just means that we can think outside the box a little bit more.”
In practical terms, this has meant opening the Biltmore lobby as informal coworking space. It has also meant building a deep partnership with Create-X, Georgia Tech’s introduction-to-entrepreneurship program, which even designated a chunk of its leased space to become a shared community kitchen open to anyone in the building. It has meant hosting student group events at no cost, something that is hard to pull off as a pure university employee operating on a campus budget.
“The seeds that we’re planting with student groups we may not see blossom for a few years,” Julie says. “But the pipeline continues to fill.”
He is new enough to the space to still be surprised by it, and experienced enough in operations to know what running a building actually requires.
His day involves a lot of things that are hard to put in a job description. Making sure the snacks are stocked. Keeping the offices clean. But also, and more importantly, keeping his ear to the ground.
“I’ll have my startup up here, and I’ll hear somebody say something downstairs that’s super similar, or something that is cohesive. And it’s like they could work together,” he says. “And I connect those people, and that creates a whole other thing.”
He is also honest about where the work is. The hardest part of the job, he says, is not the operations.
It is explaining the vision to people from the outside.
What is this place, really? What do you get from being here?
Those are questions that take more than a website to answer, and it is part of why events have become the primary way Studio B draws people in. You have to show people rather than tell them.
One of the more interesting things Julie talks about is a framework that Collaborative Real Estate uses internally known as the collaboration spectrum.
The idea is that community does not happen just because you put people in the same building. It develops in stages: awareness, then interest, then trust, then collaboration.
“We don’t necessarily control whether people trust each other,” she says. “But we do control the conditions that make it more likely for them to get to that point.”
When she was with her previous coworking operation, her community team increased member retention by 30 percent over six years. That is not an accident. It is what happens when you treat a building as a place where people belong rather than a location where people work.
For coworking operators who are used to thinking about retention in terms of pricing and amenities, this is worth noting. The member who feels seen and known and connected to something bigger than themselves is not comparison-shopping every 90 days. The member who showed up for an event, got introduced to someone useful by their community manager, and found that introduction turned into a collaboration — that person is not leaving.
"Community drives retention. And there’s a business case for it, hard stop."
The traditional property management systems Collaborative used for the rest of their portfolio were not built for this. They worked fine for conventional tenants. For a coworking community, it was a non-starter.
Julie chose Coworks to run Studio B after evaluating several options, including platforms she had used previously. The decision came down to fit.
Studio B is a focused space with a lean team and a tight budget. It did not need the complexity of a platform built for a 20,000-square-foot multi-location operation. It needed something clean, affordable, and fast to learn.
“We needed something that was a little bit more simple, easy for somebody to learn quickly,” Julie says. “Had enough features that we felt like it supported our community, but not so feature rich that we’re just drowning in functionality.”
Chris echoes that from the day-to-day perspective. “It is super straightforward. There is just one way to do each thing, and it’s all right in front of you.” Members use the mobile app regularly — for payments, maintenance requests, and event communications. Chris is in the process of integrating the Coworks calendar so that the whole building knows what’s coming up.
Studio B is pretty new, still in active buildout, and already full. That is not a coincidence. A few things stand out as genuinely transferable:
What is already clear is that Julie, Chris, and the team are doing something worth watching. They are proving, in one of commercial real estate’s most uncertain moments, that the answer is not smaller bets. It is smarter ones.