Transform Your Campus with Real-Time Data

Reimagine Campus Efficiency: How Real-Time Space Data Transforms Higher Education

September 17, 2025

7 min read

Higher education institutions are under increasing pressure to provide new and personalized campus experiences. A critical challenge is the diverse space needs you have for your classrooms, labs, offices, study areas, meeting rooms and communal event spaces. Not to mention decreasing enrollment, tightening budgets and higher expectations from digitally native students and faculty.

We’re now seeing the start of the “enrollment cliff” as a result of the Great Recession, and rising tuition costs are making alternatives like apprenticeships more appealing to enrollment-aged students. You’re likely also facing funding cuts as the House Committee on Education and the Workforce seeks to find $330 billion in savings.

Amid challenges around enrollment and budget, your students also expect more flexible and accessible learning options. While 82% of students are choosing hybrid learning models because they provide more flexibility, other reports show more than half (53%) of students and faculty still prefer to have options for on-site learning and teaching.

The pressures and expectations you face today mean that every resource is critically important. But when you can’t easily track and report on space allocation and usage, you may be missing opportunities to maximize your campus assets. 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 campus space utilization. 

What Are Real-Time Space Insights?

Real-time insights are dynamic data streams that continuously update to show how, when and where your on-campus spaces are used. Analytics from these data streams provide an in-the-moment view of activity as it is happening, whereas static reports and manual headcounts you may currently rely on only show incomplete snapshots of “expected state” at certain points.  

You can use real-time space insights to better understand occupancy analytics by room or department, utilization by space type (e.g., classrooms, labs, study booths and meeting spaces) and specific time blocks when these areas are used. They can also capture time-of-day trends to show when demand for space increases or decreases. As an example, you can leverage these insights to see what computer labs or study areas fill up most on specific days of the week or which rooms stay vacant even when there are high booking rates.  

With real-time data you can make bigger-picture decisions faster and more decisively, whether that’s consolidating underused space, optimizing cleaning schedules or reallocating space to improve the student and faculty experience. Real-time space insights are grounded in live evidence, helping you build a foundation for more agile, efficient and responsive campuses.

5 Key Benefits of Real-Time Space Utilization Analytics

Your institution needs to achieve value-driven outcomes with its physical campus space. It’s critical to get more students and faculty engaged, and space optimization is a prime way to achieve that goal.

Read on for five benefits you can achieve with real-time space analytics.

1. Identify Underutilized Areas to Repurpose or Consolidate

Real-time space insights make it easy to pinpoint which classrooms, floors, labs or study and meeting spaces 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 computer lab with workstations that are rarely booked. Your real-time data can help you decide if it would be prudent to convert the area those workstations are in to something else. The result is a campus real estate footprint that actually aligns with the demands and needs of the people using it.

2. Support Grant Recovery, Chargebacks and Compliance

Using real-time space insights gives you more accurate and defensible data on how campus facilities are used by different departments, programs, students and groups. With this level of visibility you can better allocate facility costs, substantiate grant funding usage and manage internal chargebacks. For instance, say a certain grant requires proof of lab occupancy or departmental use of specialized research facilities; your real-time data creates verifiable records that can support reimbursement and compliance reporting. Similarly, chargebacks can become fair and more transparent when you can bill departments based on actual space utilization rather than estimates. The result is stronger compliance, reduced disputes and the ability to maximize recovery of eligible funds.

3. 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 classroom allocations or testing new lab locations, scenario planning and modeling will provide you with any likely impacts on occupancy and workflows. Using this evidence-based approach, you can reduce risk, build confidence among students and faculty and help your campus usage grow.

4. Enhance Student and Faculty Experience

Allocating space based on real usage patterns helps your students and faculty alike find the right environments to teach, learn, 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 the physical buildings on campus that they use removes friction to create a more engaging and productive environment.  

5. Reduce Energy and Maintenance 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 match actual usage and need. Over time, the increased operational agility can help to drive significant cost savings and more sustainability for your campus footprint. Directing resources where they deliver the most value is critical to optimizing your space.

4 Best Practices for Space Optimization

Many higher education institutions like yours often still rely 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, campus-wide insights necessary for true higher education space optimization. Here are four best practices you can easily put in place with a unified solution.  

Regularly review space utilization analytics by department, space type and time block. 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 faculty, students and administrators in interpreting data and planning changes helps build 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.

Transform Scattered Data and Start Acting on Real-Time Space Insights

Your campus will continue to evolve, and you want to be able to adapt faster, save more and create inspiring, engaging environments for students, faculty and staff. 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 fly blind. If you’re ready to transform your campus with real-time data and insights, discover how Accruent Space Intelligence can help.  