Hybrid work left a silent hole in commercial real estate portfolios: floors paid for and half empty. The tenant signed for a thousand metres when it filled a thousand; today it fills six hundred. When the lease comes up for renewal, that gap is going to be on the table — and if you don't know the real utilisation, you negotiate blind against whoever measured it.
The fix isn't to speculate about the return to the office. It's to measure. Real utilisation by floor and by zone gives you the renewal conversation with data — for right-sizing, for repurposing dead floors, for proving value where it exists. The metre nobody uses is a cost to the tenant and a risk to you; seeing it is the first step to solving it.
But retaining the tenant isn't only a question of price per metre. It's comfort. A tenant who leaves over temperature complaints, over heavy air, over a building that's never quite right, takes the occupancy and the NOI with them. Occupant wellbeing stopped being a nice extra — it became a leasing differentiator. Healthy buildings, with air and comfort under control and proven, retain tenants and command a premium. The others lose to them.
And there's the portfolio owner's angle: which assets push the opex up? It's hard to see when every building has a different BMS, a different vendor, a different format. A layer that connects all of that and gives you energy intensity and GRESB ranking per asset turns an opaque portfolio into a manageable one — and GRESB and the green premium move the asset's value and the cost of financing, not just the bill.
In real estate, the space is the product. Knowing how it's actually used — and how people feel in it — isn't instrumentation. It's asset management with your eyes open.