The corporate world has largely become a hybrid-first environment, putting organizations like yours at a crossroads when it comes to optimizing and maximizing office space. You may be grappling with how to make smarter and more agile decisions about your company’s current real-estate portfolio, and you’re not alone.
Hybrid work models mean people are going to offices less often – and when they do go, they are utilizing those spaces differently. As a result, office space is often ill-suited and underused, draining resources and affecting the overall satisfaction of your employees. Expenses for office space rose 5.5% annually between 2019 and 2023, a much higher compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from the 3.6% found over a pre-pandemic 18-year period ending with Q2 2019.
Real estate continues to be a top operating expense, so you must optimize every square foot you have. Leveraging real-time space insights can help. In this article, we uncover what real-time space insights are, their key benefits and best practices for optimizing your space.
Related Read: The Future of Space Management: Solving Today’s Challenges with Integrated Technology
What Are Real-Time Space Insights?
Real-time insights are dynamic data streams that continuously update to show how, when and where your office spaces are used. Analytics from these data streams provide an in-the-moment view of workplace activity as it is happening, whereas static reports and manual headcounts that organizations previously relied on only show incomplete snapshots at certain points.
You can use real-time space insights to better understand occupancy by room or floor, utilization by space type (e.g., conference rooms, huddle spaces or dedicated desks) and department-level usage patterns. They can also capture time-of-day trends to show where demand for space increases or decreases throughout the work week. As an example, you can leverage these insights to see what desks, rooms or floors fill up on specific days of the week or which meeting rooms stay vacant even when there are high booking rates.
With real-time data you can act faster and more decisively, whether that’s consolidating underused space, optimizing cleaning schedules or reallocating space to improve the employee experience. Real-time space insights are grounded in live evidence, helping you build a foundation for more agile, efficient and responsive workplaces.
4 Key Benefits of Real-Time Space Utilization Analytics
Office vacancies are creating opportunities and urgency to repurpose space. May 2025 data showed the national vacancy rate continuing to trend high at 19.4%. With the need to achieve value-driven outcomes like higher employee satisfaction and better use of key data, the following are four benefits of real-time space analytics.
Related Read: Future-Proof Your Real Estate Portfolio: A Guide for When to Reduce or Repurpose Office Space
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Identify Underutilized Areas to Repurpose or Consolidate
Real-time space insights make it easy to pinpoint which rooms, floors or zones are consistently under- or unused. When you can visualize occupancy data and trends it’s easier to determine whether the right move is to consolidate certain spaces or reconfigure them to support higher-value purposes. For example, you may have a conference room or group of rooms that are rarely booked. Your real-time data can help you decide if it would be prudent to convert those rooms into something else or reduce your office square footage altogether. The result is a real-estate footprint that actually aligns with your business demands and employee needs.
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Deploy Data-Driven Scenario Planning
Dynamic analytics let you test and evaluate a range of space utilization strategies before making any changes. Whether you’re looking at departmental moves, reassigning teams to different areas or floors or testing new seating arrangements for hybrid employees, scenario modeling and planning will provide you with any likely impacts on occupancy and workflows. Using this evidence-based approach, you can reduce risk, build stakeholder confidence and evolve your portfolio with precision.
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Improve Employee Experience and Productivity
Allocating space based on real usage patterns helps your employees find the right environments to focus and collaborate. Real-time data can help you properly resource popular areas and understand spaces that may need to be reimagined into something else. Implementing a thoughtful alignment between people and workspace removes friction and creates a more engaging and productive environment.
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Reduce Energy and Facility Costs
You can work to eliminate unnecessary energy consumption and maintenance costs by aligning building services to actual real-time usage data. For instance, think about your HVAC systems, lighting and cleaning schedules. Traditional methods are based on fixed assumptions, but with real-time space insights you can make dynamic adjustments to these areas to match actual usage and need. Over time, the increased operational agility can help to drive significant cost savings and more sustainability for your retail footprint. Directing resources where they deliver the most value is critical to your portfolio optimization.
4 Best Practices for Space Optimization
Many companies today are still reliant on Excel or siloed point solutions to keep track of space utilization data. This leads to a lack of unified and actionable data. What you need to consider is a unified platform that can give you the real-time, portfolio-wide insights necessary for true corporate real estate optimization. Here are four best practices that advanced organizations can easily do with a unified solution.
- Regularly review space utilization analytics by department and space type. Consistently tracking this data lets you spot emerging trends early so you can make timely adjustments.
- Engage stakeholders to ensure collaborative interpretation of insights. Buy-in is important when implementing new changes. Involving cross-functional teams helps build that support while bolstering alignment and accountability.
- Use scenario modeling to test, iterate and validate new strategies before putting them into play. Reduce risk with simulations that uncover where impacts may occur before you make a change for real.
- Establish a governance process to maintain continuous improvement. Needs will evolve over time, meaning your space strategy must be agile and responsive. A data-driven and structured framework helps you stay ready.
Related Read: The Role of Data and Technology in Unifying and Optimizing Office Space
Transform Scattered Data and Start Acting on Real-Time Space Insights
The workplace will continue to evolve, and you want to be able to adapt faster, save more and create inspiring, productive environments for your teams. To do that, you need an intelligent space management system that gets rid of fragmented and manual data, offering a centralized view of your analytics with visualization by space type, department and time block. You should look for space planning software that has seamless integration capabilities and built-in scenario modeling and forecasting features that are unique.
Every square foot matters and you don’t want to be flying blind. If you’re ready to transform your workplace with real-time data and insights, discover how Accruent Space Intelligence can help.
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