A Bad Property Decision Doesn't Only Cost You Once
The lease on a regional office is up in nine months. The board wants a recommendation: renew, resize or exit. The evidence on the table is a two-week utilisation study from last spring, a headcount forecast from finance, and a general sense that the office feels busy on Tuesdays.
On that basis, the organisation is about to commit itself for the next five or ten years.
Nobody would call that reckless. It's how most property decisions still get made. But it's worth being honest about what's riding on it.
Start with the decision, not the dashboard
Most business cases for workplace data fall apart for the same reason: the conversation starts with the technology.
"A CFO probably doesn't care that you've got more occupancy data or a better dashboard," says Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations at Metrikus. "They care about what you're going to do differently because you've got that information."
Are we carrying more space than we need? Are we about to renew a building that isn't really working for us? Are we spending money fitting out space based on assumptions rather than actual demand? Those are the questions that make the commercial case clear, because each one is attached to real money.
"The value isn't in having more data," says Nate. "It's in making a better decision because of it."
"The value isn't in having more data. It's in making a better decision because of it."
- Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations, Metrikus
The most expensive mistake in the estate
Ask where the biggest financial opportunity in the workplace sits and the answer is usually property, simply because the numbers are so large. A lease decision or a major fit-out can commit an organisation to millions of pounds over several years. And fit-out isn't getting cheaper: Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 UK fit-out cost guide notes that costs remain structurally higher following the post-2022 reset, with no return to pre-pandemic pricing.
For Nate, the costliest mistake is committing to the wrong amount or type of space. "You're not just paying the lease," he says. "You're potentially fitting it out, maintaining it, cleaning it, heating and cooling it and operating it for years."
The frustrating part is how thin the evidence behind that commitment can be. The original decision may have been based on a very small snapshot of how the workplace was actually being used.
"A bad property decision doesn't cost you once," says Nate. "It can keep costing you for years."
"A bad property decision doesn't cost you once. It can keep costing you for years."
- Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations, Metrikus
"Doing nothing" isn't doing nothing
When investment in workplace data gets deprioritised, it's usually framed as a decision to wait. Keep the current approach for another couple of years and revisit it later.
Nate thinks that framing is misleading. "The organisation isn't actually doing nothing," he says. "During those three years it's still making decisions. It's renewing leases. It's fitting out offices. It's changing layouts. It's planning headcount. It's renegotiating contracts."
The only difference is that it's making them with incomplete information.
"The cost of doing nothing isn't really the cost of the technology you didn't buy," he says. "It's the cumulative cost of the decisions you couldn't make confidently."
A business case finance will actually believe
If the value is real, why is it so hard to prove? Partly because vendors overreach. There's a temptation to turn every benefit into a financial number, and finance teams can spot it a mile off.
Nate's approach is to separate value into three categories, and be clear about which is which.
Hard savings. Reducing space, changing a contract, cutting an operating cost. Measurable, and relatively easy to attribute. Cleaning, FM and energy sit here too: the individual numbers are smaller than a lease, but the decisions come round far more often.
Cost avoidance. Not taking additional space, avoiding an unnecessary fit-out, making a better lease decision. One organisation in the London insurance market avoided £500,000 in lease costs because it had the evidence to make a better space decision.
Experience, productivity and confidence. These absolutely have value, sometimes enormous value. But they're much harder to attribute to a single piece of technology.
"A credible business case should be very clear about what you can measure and what you can't," says Nate. "Not everything that has value can be turned into a neat ROI calculation." Being honest about that is exactly what makes the rest of the case believable.
Not less space. The right space.
The conversation has matured. Straight after Covid, the question was simply: have we got too much space? Now organisations are asking a better one: have we got the right space?
"You can have too much space overall and still have people struggling to find somewhere to have a meeting on Tuesday morning," says Nate. "The goal isn't the smallest possible workplace. It's the right workplace for the demand you've actually got."
Answering that takes a much broader evidence base than average occupancy: peaks, day-of-week patterns, desk demand against meeting-room demand, how different types of space are used, headcount forecasts, how all of that has changed over time, and ideally enough history to understand seasonality.
"Deciding what you're going to need for the next five or ten years based on a two-week utilisation study feels incredibly risky," says Nate. "The bigger and longer-term the decision, the stronger the evidence underneath it should be."
"The bigger and longer-term the decision, the stronger the evidence underneath it should be."
- Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations, Metrikus
Three decisions, twelve months
The technology will keep getting more accessible. Sensors will get cheaper, integrations easier, AI more capable. But that alone won't close the gap, because AI is only as useful as the information underneath it. The organisations with consistent, trusted data across their estate will move fastest, and increasingly the insight will come to them rather than the other way round. The advantage isn't the technology. It's how quickly an organisation can turn trusted information into a decision.
That's what Metrikus is built for: one trusted view of the whole estate, so real estate and workplace leaders have the evidence behind their biggest decisions before they make them.
Which leaves a simple test. Nate's advice to any real estate leader: "Look at the three biggest property decisions you're going to make over the next twelve months and ask yourself whether you actually have enough evidence to make them confidently."
If the answer is no, that's where the business case starts.
See how Metrikus builds the evidence behind your next property decision. Book a demo