Your Estate Is Not 40% Utilised. That's Just the Average.
Two offices sit side by side on the quarterly portfolio report. Both show 40% average utilisation. Both get the same green tick. On paper, they're the same building.
They aren't. One sits steadily around 40% all week. The other is almost empty on Monday and Friday, then so busy from Tuesday to Thursday that people are hunting for somewhere to hold a meeting. One needs their space mix rethinking. The other might be carrying more space than it needs. The report treats them as the same problem.
That's what happens when a portfolio is managed through averages. And for real estate leaders running estates across multiple cities and countries, it's one of the most expensive blind spots there is.
Thirty buildings, thirty versions of reality
There's no magic number of buildings where workplace data gets difficult. The problem changes at the point you can no longer compare them consistently.
"If you've got thirty buildings across different countries, you've probably got different sensor technologies, different landlords, different definitions of capacity and occupancy, different working cultures," says Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations at Metrikus. "At that point, you're not really dealing with thirty versions of the same problem. You're trying to create one consistent picture from thirty different versions of reality."
That's the line between building intelligence and portfolio intelligence. Understanding one building well is a data problem. Understanding thirty buildings together is a consistency problem, and it needs a different approach.
"You're not really dealing with thirty versions of the same problem. You're trying to create one consistent picture from thirty different versions of reality."
- Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations, Metrikus
The manual model doesn't scale
In a lot of organisations, that consistent picture is still built by hand. Information arrives from different systems, different FM providers, different regions and different sensor technologies. Somebody has to pull it together, normalise it and turn it into the view leadership asked for.
"By the time that's happened, you've potentially spent days or weeks answering a question that should have taken minutes," says Nate. "The more buildings you add, the harder that manual model becomes to sustain."
One global professional services firm with more than 30 buildings across three continents felt that cost directly. Once its building data sat in one place, the reporting that used to take 14 days came down to two hours. That's not a marginal efficiency gain. It's the difference between a portfolio question being worth asking and not.
Before you compare buildings, make the data comparable
Speed is the obvious cost of the manual model. Trust is the bigger one.
"Occupancy" sounds like a simple metric. It isn't. One building might be measuring people entering the floor. Another might be measuring occupied desks. A third might be looking at room presence. Put those numbers next to each other and they look comparable. They're measuring different things.
"Once people realise that, they start questioning everything," says Nate. "Before you can compare buildings, you have to make the data comparable."
This is where most portfolio comparisons quietly fall apart. Not because the data is missing, but because nobody has done the work of making it mean the same thing everywhere. Until that happens, every league table and regional comparison carries a hidden asterisk, and the people using it know it.
"Before you can compare buildings, you have to make the data comparable."
- Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations, Metrikus
The average tells you there might be a problem
Once the data is genuinely comparable, the first thing most organisations discover is how much the average was hiding.
An estate reporting 40% utilisation doesn't mean every building is sitting comfortably at 40%. One building might be struggling for capacity three days a week while another is practically empty. The same variation shows up inside buildings: plenty of desks but not enough meeting rooms, or plenty of meeting rooms in the wrong sizes.
The wider market shows the same gap. CBRE's 2026 occupancy benchmarking puts average global office utilisation at 53%, but average peak utilisation at 80%. The same estates can look comfortably half-full or uncomfortably crowded, depending on which number lands on the slide.
"The average tells you there might be a problem," says Nate. "The pattern tells you what the problem actually is."
Two locations with the same average can need completely different decisions. As Nate puts it: "Averages on their own aren't intelligence. Context is."
"The average tells you there might be a problem. The pattern tells you what the problem actually is."
- Nate Colle, Head of Professional Services and Operations, Metrikus
The goal isn't to make every building behave the same
It's tempting to treat regional variation as something to fix. If one office runs differently from the rest, bring it into line.
Nate sees it differently. "You have to separate behaviour from the workplace's response to that behaviour," he says. "You're probably not going to change the fact that people in one region work differently from people somewhere else. But you can change how the workplace responds."
That response is where the real levers sit: the mix of space, the ratio of desks to collaboration areas, meeting-room sizes, cleaning schedules and, potentially, how much space you actually operate. Every one of those is a decision a portfolio leader can act on, but only when they can see what's happening in each building on a like-for-like basis.
The objective isn't uniformity. It's understanding why buildings differ, and making better decisions because of it.
One picture, not thirty reports
For real estate leaders, the shift is simple to describe and hard to do manually: stop managing thirty buildings as thirty separate reports, and start seeing the estate as one consistent picture. That's what Metrikus is built to do. It brings data from every building, system and sensor into one comparable view, so the patterns underneath the average become visible and the decisions that follow can be made with confidence.
The average will always have a place on the board slide. It just shouldn't be the thing making the decision.
See how Metrikus gives you one consistent picture of your estate. Book a demo