AdHocSpace creates first short-term space booking portal in Asia

Will it become the AirBnB for short-term commercial space rental?

AdHocSpace bills itself as the first online portal in Asia which helps venues market their unused spaces to companies who requires spaces for their events.

"Clients who require spaces only need to have a single point of contact to get quotes from multiple venues. Currently, our focus is only on spaces like meeting rooms, training rooms/seminar rooms and auditoriums, with extension to other space types in the next 12 months," said founder Melverick Ng.

Melverick adds that AdHocSpace manages corporate training space booking from end-to-end automatically and electronically, from receiving the enquiry, to quotation generation, invoice generation, calendar management and even payment management. It aims to be the AirBnB for short-term commercial space rental.

Currently, they are looking for future expansion into other space types, other disposable services required during trainings (catering, equipment rental) and also regional expansion.

The Founder

Melverick Ng, 42 years old is a local serial entrepreneur who has successfully built and grown a serviced office from a small space with only 5 rooms to over 80+ rooms in Mountbatten Square in a short span of 6 years. Coming from an IT background, he has always been interested in Technology startups even before the Tech Boom. Currently, he is overseeing the serviced office operations and running a small angel fund Alacrity Capital, on top of a few other technology startups.

"There are a lot of venues in Singapore which have unused spaces during their off-peak hours, be it meeting rooms, training rooms, classrooms or even auditoriums. However, as venue rental is not their core business, most of these venues do not have the proper channel or even the manpower to manage any adhoc bookings. On the other hand, clients who require a training room or meeting room on an adhoc basis for their events/trainings are facing difficulties finding suitable spaces/trainings for their event," he said.

According to Melverick, AdHocSpace did not start out with the intention to be developed into a full fledged tech-startup where the whole booking process is managed from end-to-end. It started out as a marketing platform where venues can list their spaces until Melverick saw the opportunity of marketing the unused spaces for venues to get in extra revenue.

The success story

AdHocSpace, which has $100,000 internal funding currently has its own success story.

AdHocSpace started with just one person manning the phone line to take in enquiries, and managing the whole booking process for both clients and venues. In a short two years, AdHocSpace has grown to have over 35 venue partners with yields more than 60 rooms available for rental.

“On average, we receive close to 100 enquiries a month (without any active marketing done), and have closed over $500k worth of bookings for the past 2 years,” said Melverick.

AdHocSpace started with $10,000 self-funded by Melverick himself and it was used to create the initial website and the salary for staff. And early this year, an additional $100,000 investment was pumped in by Melverick, mainly to fund the marketing costs, the new website development costs and also to sustain two employees’ payroll.

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Company Profile

Name of the Company: AdHocSpace Pte Ltd
Founders: Melverick Ng
Website: www.adhocspace.sg
Major Investors: Alacrity Capital
Total Funding at hand: $110,000
Start of Operation: 2011/2012
 

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