Office Occupancy Tracking Evolves as More Companies Call Workers Back

As more workers return to the office more days of the week, proptech is providing landlords and occupiers the data they crave for better decision-making about an evolving set of issues — all to make their businesses more cost effective and efficient.

Major companies like Amazon and J.P. Morgan Chase are mandating their employees return to the office at least several days a week. The result is a greater focus on office occupancy technology and the data it can produce to address the challenges of reorganizing leases to better fit an occupier’s space needs (“rightsizing,” in industry parlance), the space design itself, ESG efforts such as sustainability, and security, experts said.

One proptech company focused on this technology is San Francisco-based VergeSense, which was founded in 2017 with the goal of placing instruments in office spaces to get the best possible data and analytics about how the spaces are actually used, said co-founder and CEO Dan Ryan.

“We use the term ‘occupancy intelligence’ to think about and define what we do,” said Ryan. “Fundamentally, it’s about aggregating all of the information on how spaces are used, packaging that up, and delivering it for customers so they can make better, more informed decisions.”

Such technology has evolved since the company’s pre-pandemic founding, he added.

“There’s a lot of new modalities in terms of data acquisition that have emerged, ranging from traditional badge swipe data, to sensor data, to data from Wi-Fi and other sources. So there’s a whole spectrum of different data sources that are available to customers to understand their occupancy.

“We started by focusing on our hardware and we built our own [internet of things]-based sensors for collecting the information,” Ryan said. “The reason we did that is back then there weren’t many great options for getting granular data. We evolved the company into more of a platform-type approach where we still have our own hardware to deliver to customers. About a year ago, we embarked on a new path to start aggregating and integrating other data sources. The biggest one that we’ve done this year has been Wi-Fi data. We’ve seen a big, big trend around customers leveraging their existing Wi-Fi networks to get some idea of occupancy, but we’ve started to plug in other data sources, including data from third parties, hardware providers and third-party sensors.”

The demand for this evolving office occupancy tech is itself growing and changing, said Carla Hinson, vice president of North America solutions at Solon, Ohio-based MRI Software.

“What’s been really interesting to me is to watch the journey of how the type of data demand has changed,” said Hinson. “I would break it down as seven types of data that feed occupancy and demand. Everything from basic badging data and how many people are in any space, but that doesn’t tell you how they’re using that space. So what we saw is amenities bookings on the owner-operator side became very popular because they started to need to book a conference room or a shared conference room, but can we tell if anyone is using it? Is it overutilized?”

COVID brought hoteling, where employees book their desks for the day. That created a fresh set of challenges for tech to address, Hinson said. 

“Do we have enough? Too many? How are people using those desks? That was more on the occupancy side,” she said. “The fourth one is around the component of assigned seating, which we saw after COVID when people were being enticed back to the office by receiving an assigned seat or desk. Then sensors, which will tell you other spaces that aren’t secured, and using visual AI, which links into cameras to count people. Another one that I’ve seen is around Wi-Fi-enabled infrastructure so that you can tell where people are connected throughout your space.”

People tracking is also important in managing a building’s energy use, as landlords increasingly look to heating and cooling to save money and meet government energy mandates.

“Sustainability-oriented topics have also been a big emerging trend that we’ve seen,” Ryan said. “There’s some variance regionally, but it’s really big in Europe and coming more so in the U.S. as well. There’s a real connection between the ability to understand occupancy and to deliver more sustainable space as well, because when you have occupancy you can optimize, and when you can optimize you can be more sustainable. The HVAC use case is a key part of that. And so I think there’s a really deep connection there.” 

Occupancy data helps address areas of concern for landlords in particular, said Etrit Demaj, co-founder of Kode Labs, a Detroit-based smart building platform that seeks to provide insights beyond basic tracking through access control, sensors and system usage technology.

“It is extremely valuable to still track occupancy for so many reasons, because occupancy can allow for different workflows, processes and automation that allows buildings to start to run more on their own without having as many operators do what they do today,” said Demaj.

Better occupancy-tracking platforms are especially valuable as property managers with institutional knowledge are retiring without enough qualified replacements. The result is a totally different type of project manager,” Demaj said. “Companies that are actually succeeding with tracking occupancy are companies that are hiring different types of talent bases to run their buildings, not the same talents that they had in the past. This is because they need a different type of profile now to actually do more with this data.

“You have some amazing minds that understand buildings better than a computer would, that an AI needs to learn from, but those people are retiring. The newer templates coming online is where these companies have a challenge. They do what they’ve always done because buildings are hard and everything is different, but, if they do the same things, they’re setting themselves up for failure and higher costs. Companies that are saying, ‘Look, I actually need data engineers and data scientists now because I have data for 20 or 100 buildings. I’m going to manage this in a much different way.’ I believe property managers are going to change drastically in the next six years. If they’re not ready for it, it’s going to be a shock.”

Elizabeth Redmond is the senior director of business intelligence at proptech firm R-Zero. Redmond was formerly CEO of CoWorkr, an occupancy analytics company she co-founded and that R-Zero acquired in July 2021.

“I ran Coworkr for a number of years,” said Redmond. “We built out a platform for space utilization and occupancy tracking. Our primary business revolved around going into tenant locations, measuring their utilization across their corporate real estate, and helping them understand what types of spaces were being used the most and least. Where did they need more or less real estate and various space types. And that’s still very much a part of our practice today.”

When R-Zero acquired CoWorkr, the idea was to use the acquired company’s data to do more things within corporate real estate environments. R-Zero’s real-time occupancy feeds can help make a workplace’s operations run more efficiently.

“R-Zero is a broader smart building platform focused on sensor measurement, delivering insights occupancy and IQ measurement, which relate back to both of those,” said Redmond. “How are people performing in space as far as comfort, impacting performance of individuals and productivity, and then delivering energy efficiency based on the devices that we put in those environments?”

Indeed, corporate real estate’s need for people tracking data continues to grow, said VergeSense’s Ryan. “If you just think about the size and the amount of money spent on corporate real estate in general, to not have the ability to measure that in some way is pretty crazy,” he said. “You’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of opex, capex, et cetera, across the world.”

Another entrepreneur in the occupancy tracking business is Matt Giffune, co-founder of Occupier, a Manhattan-based lease management software firm that centralizes company lease data in an application that allows commercial tenants, including office occupiers, to better manage their space.

“Our customers use our software for all the data associated with their portfolio, both financial obligations and legal obligations, as well as custom data points like the people in the space, the desks in the space, and the offices in the space,” said Giffune. “This gives them the ability to look holistically at their real estate portfolio and do strategic planning for the actual cost center of real estate occupancy. For example, a general downsizing of space would be part of portfolio optimization.”

Giffune also emphasized that AI is already impacting occupancy tracking and use analysis.

“I think that artificial intelligence is going to create a way for this data to be in real time,” he said. “The Kastle Systems and VTS index of occupancy are good starting points for the data, but the world is changing so quickly that there’s going to be autonomous AI agents that are constantly working and checking systems, and making sure that the decision-makers have this data.”

Indeed, Haniel Lynn, CEO of Kastle Systems, the security firm whose office occupancy tracker became a go-to barometer the past few years, agreed that occupancy tracking is a key component supporting his firm’s work. But it’s also not in its first inning.

“We’ve been around for a while, and we’ve been tracking the data for our clients for decades,” said Lynn, whose Falls Church, Va., company was founded in 1972. “And, so, while it feels like there’s a lot of heat around this idea of tracking occupancy now, it’s not a fleeting thing. It’s been around because people have for a long time wanted to understand the past, current and future of how their spaces are being used.”

Looking ahead, Lynn sees occupancy use tracking not as a technology one-off, but rather as a part of a converging and diverging tech whole.

“I think that the most interesting developments or evolutions of technology is that you may have a use case for one thing, but it can be applied in other cases,” said Lynn. “For you now to have information, data and analytics behind something that’s happening — tracked access control swipes, tracked visual imaging from the video cameras — then to apply an analysis to it to inform a different set of decisions than may have been the original security intent of those devices, might serve a different purpose.

“And so is it here to stay or here to go? I would say that technology is evolving in such a way that so many different use cases now apply to technology. And the data streams that come off it allow you more interesting things that might inform a lot of other decisions that you might not have considered originally.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.