Corporate real estate leaders aren’t short on data. The harder problem is determining which signals are reliable enough to drive a portfolio decision.
An office can show low average utilization while reaching capacity midweek. Booking data can suggest strong demand even when actual occupancy tells a different story. A location that looks expensive on a cost-per-square-foot basis may still support teams or business functions that make it strategically important.
Across a large portfolio, those differences complicate decisions about leases, consolidation, investment, and workplace design.
The Eptura 2025 Workplace Index found that 34% of businesses planned to increase office attendance, while two-thirds of organizations were already managing between six and 40 workplace technologies. CRE teams are being asked to plan for changing workplace demand while making sense of information spread across an increasingly complicated technology environment.
The next phase of corporate real estate management isn’t about collecting more data. It’s about connecting the right data well enough to make confident decisions about where to invest, where to consolidate, and how to get more from the portfolio organizations already have.
Key takeaways
- Portfolio optimization requires more context than average occupancy. Peak demand, utilization, booking, cost, and team-level data can reveal very different patterns
- Comparing booking and occupancy data helps CRE teams separate employee intent from actual workplace behavior
- Connected workplace data creates a stronger foundation for lease, consolidation, redesign, and other portfolio scenarios
- AI can make forecasting and analysis faster, but its usefulness depends on reliable data across workplace and real estate systems
- CRE technology should make portfolio questions easier to answer, not add another isolated source of information
Portfolio optimization requires more than reducing space
For several years, much of the CRE conversation centered on reducing office footprints. That calculation is becoming more nuanced.
JLL’s 2025 Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report found that 73% of CRE leaders prioritize portfolio optimization. The distinction matters because the smallest portfolio isn’t necessarily the most efficient one.
Reducing space too aggressively can create problems elsewhere. Employees may struggle to find desks on peak days, meeting rooms can become bottlenecks, and teams can lose spaces that support specific types of work. Organizations can also find themselves investing in additional space later if attendance requirements or headcount change.
The better question is whether each location has the right amount and mix of space for actual demand.
A building with 45% average occupancy, for example, doesn’t automatically have 55% excess capacity. Demand may regularly exceed 80% on certain days. One floor could be consistently busy while another remains mostly empty. Meeting rooms may operate near capacity even while individual desks are readily available.
Tracking the right space utilization metrics helps CRE teams understand those differences. Average utilization, peak utilization, meeting room usage, desk occupancy, and patterns over time provide much more context than a single building-wide percentage.
Looking below portfolio averages helps teams determine whether the right response is consolidation, reconfiguration, policy changes, or no major portfolio change at all.
Booking and occupancy data tell different parts of the story
One of the more useful comparisons CRE teams can make is between employee intent and actual workplace behavior.
Booking data shows intent. Occupancy data shows what happened.
A building may have high desk reservations but significantly lower physical occupancy because employees book spaces they don’t ultimately use. Meeting rooms can appear fully booked even while check-in or sensor data reveals recurring no-shows.
The reverse can happen, too. Employees may use unreserved spaces, causing booking data to understate demand.
Comparing these datasets gives CRE teams more context around how employees interact with the workplace. Understanding the relationship between occupancy and utilization data can also help teams determine whether apparent capacity problems reflect actual demand or how employees are using the available space.
High room demand combined with moderate building occupancy, for example, may support converting some individual workstations into collaboration space rather than reducing the overall footprint. Persistent reservation no-shows might justify automatic room-release policies. Demand concentrated in particular neighborhoods can indicate which environments employees prefer before workplace teams invest in a larger redesign.
The objective is to understand the behavior behind the numbers before making a real estate decision based on them.
Connected data makes scenario planning more credible
Consider a lease expiration.
The organization could renew the entire space, reduce its footprint, consolidate employees into another location, relocate, or redesign the existing workplace. Each option has implications beyond rent.
CRE teams may need to account for:
- Current and projected headcount
- Peak attendance
- Team-level demand
- Existing capacity
- Lease and operating costs
- Space configuration
- Planned business growth
- Sustainability goals
When that information lives in separate systems, teams can spend significant time assembling the baseline before they can evaluate the scenarios themselves.
Connected workplace and portfolio data shortens that distance.
Instead of relying primarily on historical headcount ratios, CRE leaders can model what might happen if attendance increases, a business unit grows, two locations consolidate, or a floor is reconfigured.
Space planning software can help teams work with floor plans, capacity, utilization, and allocation data when evaluating these options. That gives planners more context before committing capital or entering another long-term lease.
A portfolio decision made today may remain in place for years. Scenario planning gives CRE leaders a way to account for a workplace that may continue changing throughout that period.
Technology fragmentation is becoming a CRE problem
Technology fragmentation isn’t only an IT concern. It directly affects how quickly CRE teams can answer portfolio questions.
The Eptura 2025 Workplace Index found that 50% of organizations use an average of 17 standalone workplace solutions.
Those systems may individually perform their jobs well. The problem appears when leaders need to answer questions that cross them.
Should this lease be renewed? Can two teams fit comfortably in one location? Why is cost per employee increasing at a particular office? Could the organization give up a floor without creating capacity problems on peak days?
Answering those questions may require information from space management, booking systems, occupancy sensors, HR platforms, access control, visitor management, maintenance systems, and financial data.
If teams have to manually combine those sources for every analysis, reporting itself becomes an obstacle to decision-making.
An integrated workplace management system can provide a more connected foundation by bringing information from different areas of the physical workplace into a common environment.
The goal isn’t integration for its own sake. CRE teams need to be able to examine relationships between cost, capacity, utilization, and employee behavior without rebuilding the dataset every time a new question arises.
Workplace experience can reveal portfolio problems
Employees experience CRE decisions at a practical level.
Can they find a desk near their team? Is the right meeting space available? Do they know who plans to be onsite before making the commute? Can they navigate an unfamiliar floor without wasting time?
Those may sound like employee experience questions, but the resulting behavior can provide useful signals for CRE teams.
Desk and room reservations can show where employees intend to work. Team coordination tools add context around attendance patterns. Booking behavior can highlight which spaces attract demand and which employees regularly avoid.
If one neighborhood consistently attracts reservations while another remains underused, the answer may not be reducing overall space. The less popular area might need a different configuration.
Similarly, if employees routinely struggle to find meeting rooms despite relatively low building occupancy, the organization may have enough square footage but the wrong mix of spaces.
Workplace collaboration tools can help employees coordinate office days, find coworkers, and reserve the spaces they need. The resulting activity also provides another source of information about how demand moves through the workplace.
This connection becomes increasingly important in a hybrid workplace, where attendance can vary considerably throughout the week.
For CRE teams, workplace friction can sometimes reveal a space planning problem before a portfolio dashboard does.
Bring visitor activity into the wider workplace picture
Employees aren’t the only people contributing to workplace demand.
Visitors, contractors, vendors, and other guests can have a meaningful impact at headquarters, client-facing locations, and sites with significant contractor activity.
Modern visitor management provides more than an efficient check-in process. Digital pre-registration, access control integrations, visitor records, and real-time information about who is onsite can strengthen security and emergency preparedness while adding another layer of workplace visibility.
A connected visitor management system can also give workplace teams better information about external traffic across facilities.
When visitor information connects with employee occupancy and access data, teams have a more complete picture of who is actually using a facility. That context can be particularly valuable when evaluating high-traffic locations or spaces where external visitors account for a meaningful share of demand.
Sustainability decisions need utilization context
Portfolio optimization and sustainability planning are increasingly connected.
JLL’s 2025 Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report found that 74% of organizations have active sustainability programs connected to occupancy planning, including efforts around portfolio rightsizing, waste reduction, and furniture reuse.
The connection makes sense. Maintaining, heating, cooling, and lighting space that consistently goes unused carries both financial and environmental costs.
But sustainability decisions face the same problem as portfolio decisions more broadly. A low average utilization rate doesn’t necessarily mean a building or floor can simply be removed from the portfolio.
CRE teams need enough context to understand when space is required, who uses it, and whether demand could be accommodated elsewhere.
Connected occupancy and portfolio information can help organizations identify opportunities to consolidate intelligently, reconfigure existing space, or operate buildings differently based on actual demand.
AI is most useful when the underlying data is connected
AI is creating new opportunities for CRE teams around forecasting, reporting, and finding patterns across large datasets. But its usefulness depends on what sits underneath it.
Applying AI to fragmented or inconsistent workplace information can make analysis faster without necessarily making it better.
Connected data creates a stronger starting point.
AI can then support work such as:
- Identifying unusual utilization patterns across locations
- Forecasting occupancy based on historical behavior
- Comparing portfolio scenarios
- Automating recurring reports
- Surfacing changes that warrant closer investigation
It can also change how leaders interact with information.
Instead of navigating several dashboards to determine which locations experienced the largest utilization changes during the previous quarter, CRE leaders can increasingly use AI-supported analytics to surface relevant patterns and decide where deeper investigation is needed.
That doesn’t remove the need for CRE expertise. It reduces the time spent assembling and sorting information so teams can focus on what the findings mean for the business.
The more useful question for organizations evaluating AI isn’t simply whether a platform has it. It’s whether AI can work across enough reliable operational data to produce insights leaders can actually use.
Evaluate CRE technology around the questions you need answered
A long feature list matters less if CRE teams still can’t answer cross-functional portfolio questions without exporting data into spreadsheets.
When evaluating corporate real estate software, leaders should look at how easily a platform connects the information needed for daily workplace operations and long-term portfolio planning.
Questions worth asking include:
- Can we compare utilization consistently across locations?
- Can we see peak demand as well as averages?
- Can we compare reservations with actual occupancy?
- Can we model portfolio and space scenarios before making changes?
- Can workplace information connect with other enterprise data?
- Can leaders access portfolio-wide reporting without manually consolidating it?
- Can AI work across connected datasets rather than isolated applications?
Integration with the tools employees already use matters, too. Eptura has expanded workplace coordination within Microsoft 365, helping organizations connect workplace planning more closely with established employee workflows.
The purpose of CRE technology shouldn’t be to create another place to look for information. It should make the decisions that follow easier to defend.
Build greater confidence into the next portfolio decision
Most CRE organizations already know they have underused space somewhere in the portfolio. They know attendance isn’t evenly distributed throughout the week, and they know workplace needs have changed.
The difficult part is deciding what to do about it.
Giving up space, renewing a lease, redesigning a floor, or consolidating locations all carry financial and operational consequences. Those decisions become harder when leaders are working from different datasets or relying on averages that don’t reflect peak demand.
Connected workplace intelligence allows CRE leaders to ask better questions: Which spaces are performing? What is driving demand? Where does capacity fail to match employee behavior? What happens if attendance, headcount, or business requirements change?
Turn workplace data into better portfolio decisions
Eptura connects workplace, facilities, and real estate information so CRE leaders can see more of what’s happening across their physical environment and use that insight to inform portfolio strategy.
Explore Eptura’s connected worktech platform to see how connected workplace intelligence can support more confident real estate decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
By Erin Sevitz
As Vice President of Content and Customer Marketing at Eptura, Erin Sevitz oversees teams responsible for providing worktech insights and engaging 25 million Eptura users worldwide. With over 10 years in thought leadership on workplace management and the built environment, Erin brings deep industry knowledge to her role. Previously, she led communications for the International Facility Management Association, a global nonprofit dedicated to professional development for workplace strategists and building managers, and served as editor in chief for IFMA’s FMJ magazine.
