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Hey Friends,
On June 18th, we hosted a Building Owner Meetup on space utilization technologies. In our monthly building owner meetups, we host a virtual event exclusively for building owners and occupiers to share ideas, successes, challenges, and insights on how to create better buildings.
This Building Owner Meetup facilitated incredible conversations from building owners and occupiers from numerous industries that typically don’t get to discuss their shared challenges. Our attendees included:
Before diving into breakout discussions, we set the stage by sharing key points from our Buyer’s Guide to Space Utilization. We also hosted rapid-fire demonstrations from leading industry vendors (shout out to Airthings, Butlr, and R-Zero for sharing their expertise and how they can help clients create new opportunities with space utilization).
With the stage set, we separated the group into industry-focused breakout discussions. After reviewing our notes, here are the top 5 takeaways we heard from building owners and occupiers on space utilization:
(Note: If you’re a building owner and like the sound of these meetups, we host one a month, and they’re free for you to attend. To get invited to August’s meetup on building operations AI chatbots, fill out this form.)
Among every building owner and occupier who has achieved success with space utilization data, there is one universal theme across industries: the program begins with utilizing whatever data is already available. One corporate occupier referred to this as the “two-for-one approach: getting space utilization data out of tech you’ve deployed for other purposes.”
The concept is the same across every industry, but what’s available to tap into vastly differs:
The pattern is evident across all industries: those with successful space utilization projects typically didn’t start with a major overhaul of sensors; they started by leveraging data from existing technologies and created a “two-for-one” scenario where space utilization insights were a bonus to the technology’s primary purpose. Once the use-cases and success stories start to pile up, the justification for adding sensors where you’re missing key data becomes more realistic.
Space utilization tech has a unique blessing and a curse: too many use cases. While it’s a blessing to have a technology that can solve so many unique problems for a building owner, it can also be overwhelming to know what you’re looking for.
To help conceptualize the complexity of understanding what space utilization data is needed, Elizabeth Redmond of R-Zero walked through some of the key metrics a building owner may consider. There is average utilization, peak utilization, average vacancies, utilization by day of the week or hour of the day, utilization by space type, and utilization by group size, among others. Each metric can tell you distinct information for different use cases, and it can be confusing to know which matters to you.
We heard two well-respected corporate building owners, each with millions of square feet of real estate, discuss their opposite approaches to gathering data and understanding the use case.
Building owner A discussed a very use-case-first approach to space utilization. They said, “I'm very cautious about what data we collect and historize, I don't want data for the sake of data. I want to make sure that we're leveraging it properly and with intent and outcome, because data storage and data processing also takes up energy, so from a sustainability perspective, I want to be mindful of that as well.”
In contrast, building owner B leads with the data. They said, “We want as much data as we can get upfront. It’s a situation of we don’t know what we don’t know. Then, we dial back the data ingestion as we understand what opportunities there are and the data that supports those opportunities.”
The Nexus Labs Smart Building Strategist Course advocates that we must always start with the human and the use case, yet the difficulty of not knowing what opportunities you’ll find with space utilization data is real. Although there may not be consensus across the industry yet on this chicken-and-egg conundrum, it’s still important for a building owner to understand which school of thought they’re leading with.
If you have a well-defined use case going into your project, you can achieve a much more accurate understanding of the project scope from the outset, and you should be hyper-focused on proving the outcomes from your specific use case.
If you plan to use space utilization data to understand the opportunities available for your building, you’ll need to be more flexible. While this method offers greater opportunities, the project champion will need to be politically astute in persuading various stakeholders to buy into the project and understand how it may impact their jobs, budget, and decision-making processes.
When compared to other building technology solutions, space utilization is unrivaled in the number of unique ways it can be used. It can be a Swiss Army knife to solve an organization’s problems. But just like a Swiss Army knife, you shouldn’t try to use all the tools as once. Just because it can do so many things at once doesn’t mean you should do all those things at once.
Through the Building Owner Meetup, we heard so many unique use cases of space utilization, we found it best to try to visually conceptualize them. Here’s a matrix of all the different use cases we heard. If we missed anything, let us know in the comments below.
The most interesting relationship dynamic in terms of space utilization is that between the tenant and the landlord.
To read the final two takeaways, please log in or become a pro member today!
The main source of potential tension comes from leasing negotiations: landlords want to know beforehand how their tenants are (or aren’t) using their spaces to plan for renewals and turnover. Conversely, leasing is a significant expense for corporations that don’t own their buildings, and they aren’t eager to disclose this data about their space usage prior to entering negotiations about lease renewals.
When the corporate tenant is a larger company, they typically carry the larger stick. As one corporate landlord put it, “When we are sitting and scoping for a new build, it doesn't actually make sense for us to put occupancy sensors in the office space, because most of the larger tech companies won't accept our occupancy sensors in the space. They want only their own for privacy and other reasons, and our main reason to have it in this space is to start to get an understanding of when is the utilization occupancy going down, so we may be able to predict when they're going to come back and want to renegotiate their lease or break their lease ahead of time.”
Yet, the smart buildings optimist can’t help but think there’s an ideal solution for both the tenant and the landlord. Perhaps the ideal solution is to focus on space utilization as a tool for reducing unnecessary energy consumption from HVAC and lighting. As one corporate tenant put it, “I want to work with the landlord on space utilization so they don’t run their equipment and charge me for running their equipment in my space when I’m not there.”
IAQ technology also offers a bridge between the tenant and the landlord. If the landlord owns the HVAC equipment, they control the quality of air coming into the space. Higher air quality means better working conditions for the tenant, and a higher-valued real estate asset for the landlord.
Getting the landlord and tenant to play nicely with space utilization data appears to be an unsolved challenge thus far. One landlord mentioned including space utilization data needs in the contracts for operational efficiency, and leaving it up to the tenants’ lawyers to determine if this is allowed. However, overall, there appears to be a level of distrust between the two entities regarding the various ways the data could be utilized.
It should come as no surprise that many of the breakout conversations centered on justifying space utilization projects and gaining internal support to follow through. Similar to the chicken-and-egg dilemma described in takeaway #2, the more internal buy-in there is for space utilization, the more use cases that are unlocked. Alternatively, the more you want to do with space utilization, the more people you need to get on board.
One representative from the tech industry discussed a major initiative for internal buy-in they’ve created, “I've recently formed a global group to drive the topic [of space utilization]. At the moment, I've been facilitating the use of occupancy sensors and then offering them to our colleagues in other regions. I feel like a sensor salesperson, and these sensors are often looked at like a piece of furniture or something optional to put into a space. So with this global group, we're trying to drive a sort of standard where we automatically put in sensors at a particular location based on some criteria.”
The general sentiment was that the organizations with more advanced space utilization projects have gotten to the point where space utilization tech is specified into new builds. Yet, even the more advanced organizations are struggling to justify the ROI in retrofit scenarios. In existing buildings, many are leveraging the existing technology mishmash (see takeaway #1) to obtain some space utilization data from the buildings. But that method typically means that your data is silo’d across multiple technology stacks (e.g., some information from badge swipes, some information from network monitoring, and some information from IAQ sensors.)
Some industries have a more difficult justification for space utilization than others.
Multifamily residential and hotels have great access control data, but they are hamstrung by a lack of a typical BMS. As one hotel building owner put it, “When the sun is hitting the south side of the building, we’d love to be able to control the window shades in empty spaces to reduce cooling demand, but what programmable logic control is going to do that? It’s going to need to be sophisticated enough to know weather, time of day, occupancy, and you start to go down the rabbit hole for an entire BMS just to be able to put the shades down.”
Another unique situation exists in higher education institutions, which seems to live on both extremes of the spectrum of space utilization. On the one hand, classrooms have great data on the number of students that should be in each room and when, which makes it easy for them to plan for those spaces. On the other hand, they have office spaces and libraries that have some of the most flexible and diverse usage among any building type.
If there’s one thing this meetup made clear, it’s that space utilization isn’t just about tracking how full your conference rooms are. It’s a lens that touches everything from capital planning to energy efficiency to tenant relationships. But with all those possibilities comes complexity. The building owners and occupiers making the most progress are those who start simple, focus on clear outcomes, and build trust, both internally and externally.
To get invited to the next building owner meetup (exclusive to building owners and operators), fill out THIS FORM.
The main source of potential tension comes from leasing negotiations: landlords want to know beforehand how their tenants are (or aren’t) using their spaces to plan for renewals and turnover. Conversely, leasing is a significant expense for corporations that don’t own their buildings, and they aren’t eager to disclose this data about their space usage prior to entering negotiations about lease renewals.
When the corporate tenant is a larger company, they typically carry the larger stick. As one corporate landlord put it, “When we are sitting and scoping for a new build, it doesn't actually make sense for us to put occupancy sensors in the office space, because most of the larger tech companies won't accept our occupancy sensors in the space. They want only their own for privacy and other reasons, and our main reason to have it in this space is to start to get an understanding of when is the utilization occupancy going down, so we may be able to predict when they're going to come back and want to renegotiate their lease or break their lease ahead of time.”
Yet, the smart buildings optimist can’t help but think there’s an ideal solution for both the tenant and the landlord. Perhaps the ideal solution is to focus on space utilization as a tool for reducing unnecessary energy consumption from HVAC and lighting. As one corporate tenant put it, “I want to work with the landlord on space utilization so they don’t run their equipment and charge me for running their equipment in my space when I’m not there.”
IAQ technology also offers a bridge between the tenant and the landlord. If the landlord owns the HVAC equipment, they control the quality of air coming into the space. Higher air quality means better working conditions for the tenant, and a higher-valued real estate asset for the landlord.
Getting the landlord and tenant to play nicely with space utilization data appears to be an unsolved challenge thus far. One landlord mentioned including space utilization data needs in the contracts for operational efficiency, and leaving it up to the tenants’ lawyers to determine if this is allowed. However, overall, there appears to be a level of distrust between the two entities regarding the various ways the data could be utilized.
It should come as no surprise that many of the breakout conversations centered on justifying space utilization projects and gaining internal support to follow through. Similar to the chicken-and-egg dilemma described in takeaway #2, the more internal buy-in there is for space utilization, the more use cases that are unlocked. Alternatively, the more you want to do with space utilization, the more people you need to get on board.
One representative from the tech industry discussed a major initiative for internal buy-in they’ve created, “I've recently formed a global group to drive the topic [of space utilization]. At the moment, I've been facilitating the use of occupancy sensors and then offering them to our colleagues in other regions. I feel like a sensor salesperson, and these sensors are often looked at like a piece of furniture or something optional to put into a space. So with this global group, we're trying to drive a sort of standard where we automatically put in sensors at a particular location based on some criteria.”
The general sentiment was that the organizations with more advanced space utilization projects have gotten to the point where space utilization tech is specified into new builds. Yet, even the more advanced organizations are struggling to justify the ROI in retrofit scenarios. In existing buildings, many are leveraging the existing technology mishmash (see takeaway #1) to obtain some space utilization data from the buildings. But that method typically means that your data is silo’d across multiple technology stacks (e.g., some information from badge swipes, some information from network monitoring, and some information from IAQ sensors.)
Some industries have a more difficult justification for space utilization than others.
Multifamily residential and hotels have great access control data, but they are hamstrung by a lack of a typical BMS. As one hotel building owner put it, “When the sun is hitting the south side of the building, we’d love to be able to control the window shades in empty spaces to reduce cooling demand, but what programmable logic control is going to do that? It’s going to need to be sophisticated enough to know weather, time of day, occupancy, and you start to go down the rabbit hole for an entire BMS just to be able to put the shades down.”
Another unique situation exists in higher education institutions, which seems to live on both extremes of the spectrum of space utilization. On the one hand, classrooms have great data on the number of students that should be in each room and when, which makes it easy for them to plan for those spaces. On the other hand, they have office spaces and libraries that have some of the most flexible and diverse usage among any building type.
If there’s one thing this meetup made clear, it’s that space utilization isn’t just about tracking how full your conference rooms are. It’s a lens that touches everything from capital planning to energy efficiency to tenant relationships. But with all those possibilities comes complexity. The building owners and occupiers making the most progress are those who start simple, focus on clear outcomes, and build trust, both internally and externally.
To get invited to the next building owner meetup (exclusive to building owners and operators), fill out THIS FORM.
The main source of potential tension comes from leasing negotiations: landlords want to know beforehand how their tenants are (or aren’t) using their spaces to plan for renewals and turnover. Conversely, leasing is a significant expense for corporations that don’t own their buildings, and they aren’t eager to disclose this data about their space usage prior to entering negotiations about lease renewals.
When the corporate tenant is a larger company, they typically carry the larger stick. As one corporate landlord put it, “When we are sitting and scoping for a new build, it doesn't actually make sense for us to put occupancy sensors in the office space, because most of the larger tech companies won't accept our occupancy sensors in the space. They want only their own for privacy and other reasons, and our main reason to have it in this space is to start to get an understanding of when is the utilization occupancy going down, so we may be able to predict when they're going to come back and want to renegotiate their lease or break their lease ahead of time.”
Yet, the smart buildings optimist can’t help but think there’s an ideal solution for both the tenant and the landlord. Perhaps the ideal solution is to focus on space utilization as a tool for reducing unnecessary energy consumption from HVAC and lighting. As one corporate tenant put it, “I want to work with the landlord on space utilization so they don’t run their equipment and charge me for running their equipment in my space when I’m not there.”
IAQ technology also offers a bridge between the tenant and the landlord. If the landlord owns the HVAC equipment, they control the quality of air coming into the space. Higher air quality means better working conditions for the tenant, and a higher-valued real estate asset for the landlord.
Getting the landlord and tenant to play nicely with space utilization data appears to be an unsolved challenge thus far. One landlord mentioned including space utilization data needs in the contracts for operational efficiency, and leaving it up to the tenants’ lawyers to determine if this is allowed. However, overall, there appears to be a level of distrust between the two entities regarding the various ways the data could be utilized.
It should come as no surprise that many of the breakout conversations centered on justifying space utilization projects and gaining internal support to follow through. Similar to the chicken-and-egg dilemma described in takeaway #2, the more internal buy-in there is for space utilization, the more use cases that are unlocked. Alternatively, the more you want to do with space utilization, the more people you need to get on board.
One representative from the tech industry discussed a major initiative for internal buy-in they’ve created, “I've recently formed a global group to drive the topic [of space utilization]. At the moment, I've been facilitating the use of occupancy sensors and then offering them to our colleagues in other regions. I feel like a sensor salesperson, and these sensors are often looked at like a piece of furniture or something optional to put into a space. So with this global group, we're trying to drive a sort of standard where we automatically put in sensors at a particular location based on some criteria.”
The general sentiment was that the organizations with more advanced space utilization projects have gotten to the point where space utilization tech is specified into new builds. Yet, even the more advanced organizations are struggling to justify the ROI in retrofit scenarios. In existing buildings, many are leveraging the existing technology mishmash (see takeaway #1) to obtain some space utilization data from the buildings. But that method typically means that your data is silo’d across multiple technology stacks (e.g., some information from badge swipes, some information from network monitoring, and some information from IAQ sensors.)
Some industries have a more difficult justification for space utilization than others.
Multifamily residential and hotels have great access control data, but they are hamstrung by a lack of a typical BMS. As one hotel building owner put it, “When the sun is hitting the south side of the building, we’d love to be able to control the window shades in empty spaces to reduce cooling demand, but what programmable logic control is going to do that? It’s going to need to be sophisticated enough to know weather, time of day, occupancy, and you start to go down the rabbit hole for an entire BMS just to be able to put the shades down.”
Another unique situation exists in higher education institutions, which seems to live on both extremes of the spectrum of space utilization. On the one hand, classrooms have great data on the number of students that should be in each room and when, which makes it easy for them to plan for those spaces. On the other hand, they have office spaces and libraries that have some of the most flexible and diverse usage among any building type.
If there’s one thing this meetup made clear, it’s that space utilization isn’t just about tracking how full your conference rooms are. It’s a lens that touches everything from capital planning to energy efficiency to tenant relationships. But with all those possibilities comes complexity. The building owners and occupiers making the most progress are those who start simple, focus on clear outcomes, and build trust, both internally and externally.
To get invited to the next building owner meetup (exclusive to building owners and operators), fill out THIS FORM.
Hey Friends,
On June 18th, we hosted a Building Owner Meetup on space utilization technologies. In our monthly building owner meetups, we host a virtual event exclusively for building owners and occupiers to share ideas, successes, challenges, and insights on how to create better buildings.
This Building Owner Meetup facilitated incredible conversations from building owners and occupiers from numerous industries that typically don’t get to discuss their shared challenges. Our attendees included:
Before diving into breakout discussions, we set the stage by sharing key points from our Buyer’s Guide to Space Utilization. We also hosted rapid-fire demonstrations from leading industry vendors (shout out to Airthings, Butlr, and R-Zero for sharing their expertise and how they can help clients create new opportunities with space utilization).
With the stage set, we separated the group into industry-focused breakout discussions. After reviewing our notes, here are the top 5 takeaways we heard from building owners and occupiers on space utilization:
(Note: If you’re a building owner and like the sound of these meetups, we host one a month, and they’re free for you to attend. To get invited to August’s meetup on building operations AI chatbots, fill out this form.)
Among every building owner and occupier who has achieved success with space utilization data, there is one universal theme across industries: the program begins with utilizing whatever data is already available. One corporate occupier referred to this as the “two-for-one approach: getting space utilization data out of tech you’ve deployed for other purposes.”
The concept is the same across every industry, but what’s available to tap into vastly differs:
The pattern is evident across all industries: those with successful space utilization projects typically didn’t start with a major overhaul of sensors; they started by leveraging data from existing technologies and created a “two-for-one” scenario where space utilization insights were a bonus to the technology’s primary purpose. Once the use-cases and success stories start to pile up, the justification for adding sensors where you’re missing key data becomes more realistic.
Space utilization tech has a unique blessing and a curse: too many use cases. While it’s a blessing to have a technology that can solve so many unique problems for a building owner, it can also be overwhelming to know what you’re looking for.
To help conceptualize the complexity of understanding what space utilization data is needed, Elizabeth Redmond of R-Zero walked through some of the key metrics a building owner may consider. There is average utilization, peak utilization, average vacancies, utilization by day of the week or hour of the day, utilization by space type, and utilization by group size, among others. Each metric can tell you distinct information for different use cases, and it can be confusing to know which matters to you.
We heard two well-respected corporate building owners, each with millions of square feet of real estate, discuss their opposite approaches to gathering data and understanding the use case.
Building owner A discussed a very use-case-first approach to space utilization. They said, “I'm very cautious about what data we collect and historize, I don't want data for the sake of data. I want to make sure that we're leveraging it properly and with intent and outcome, because data storage and data processing also takes up energy, so from a sustainability perspective, I want to be mindful of that as well.”
In contrast, building owner B leads with the data. They said, “We want as much data as we can get upfront. It’s a situation of we don’t know what we don’t know. Then, we dial back the data ingestion as we understand what opportunities there are and the data that supports those opportunities.”
The Nexus Labs Smart Building Strategist Course advocates that we must always start with the human and the use case, yet the difficulty of not knowing what opportunities you’ll find with space utilization data is real. Although there may not be consensus across the industry yet on this chicken-and-egg conundrum, it’s still important for a building owner to understand which school of thought they’re leading with.
If you have a well-defined use case going into your project, you can achieve a much more accurate understanding of the project scope from the outset, and you should be hyper-focused on proving the outcomes from your specific use case.
If you plan to use space utilization data to understand the opportunities available for your building, you’ll need to be more flexible. While this method offers greater opportunities, the project champion will need to be politically astute in persuading various stakeholders to buy into the project and understand how it may impact their jobs, budget, and decision-making processes.
When compared to other building technology solutions, space utilization is unrivaled in the number of unique ways it can be used. It can be a Swiss Army knife to solve an organization’s problems. But just like a Swiss Army knife, you shouldn’t try to use all the tools as once. Just because it can do so many things at once doesn’t mean you should do all those things at once.
Through the Building Owner Meetup, we heard so many unique use cases of space utilization, we found it best to try to visually conceptualize them. Here’s a matrix of all the different use cases we heard. If we missed anything, let us know in the comments below.
The most interesting relationship dynamic in terms of space utilization is that between the tenant and the landlord.
To read the final two takeaways, please log in or become a pro member today!
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This is a great piece!
I agree.