HqO Blog • Observations

Friday Isn’t the Office’s Problem – Monday Is

 

 Greg Gomer

 

 Apr 27, 2026

 

  4 min. read

 

         Greg Gomer

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Everyone's writing about Friday.

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Kastle's latest data, picked up by Propmodo this week, shows office attendance peaking at 51% of pre-pandemic levels midweek and collapsing to 29% by Friday in major cities. The conventional take: Friday is the broken day. Fix Friday and you fix the office.

I've been looking at our own behavioral data, and I think everyone's chasing the wrong day.

Across HqO's US portfolio, we tracked door unlocks day by day for the last 90 days against the 90 days before that. Same buildings. Same tenants. Same calendar pressures everyone else is reading about. Here's what shifted.

Monday dropped 3.2 percentage points of weekly share. It's now barely 15% of the week. Friday? Down 0.6 points. Basically flat.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday gained almost 4 points combined. Tuesday and Thursday are now nearly tied for the busiest day in the building, each pulling in over 22% of weekly traffic. The classic three-day office core (Tue–Thu) accounts for nearly 69% of every door swipe across our portfolio.

So the consultants writing the "Friday is dying" headlines are looking at a flat trend line. The real story is that Monday is quietly disappearing.

Why does this matter? Because the policy response is completely different.

If Friday is your problem, you write a Friday mandate. You add a free lunch. You program something. Companies have been trying that playbook for three years and it hasn't moved the needle.

If Monday is your problem, you've got something more interesting on your hands. People are choosing where to start their week. And they're not choosing the office. They're easing in from home, doing async work, and arriving at the building Tuesday morning when collaboration is already queued up.

That's not a Monday problem. That's a hybrid pattern stabilizing into something predictable. The four-day in-office week isn't being mandated. It's being chosen, starting Tuesday morning.

Now look at what those Tuesday-through-Thursday people actually do once they're inside.

Across our portfolio, conference room bookings are up across nearly every category, anywhere from 35% to over 300% versus the prior period. Roof deck bookings up nearly 170%. Outdoor space up over 130%. Large meeting rooms up 140%.

What's down? Kitchen bookings off 39%. Lounge bookings off 29%.

That's the entire story in two columns. People aren't coming into the office to eat. They aren't coming in to lounge around. They're coming in to meet, to think out loud with a whiteboard, to be on the roof in May, to use the parts of the building they can't replicate from a kitchen island in Brookline or a guest room in Tribeca.

The office isn't dying. It's specializing. It's becoming a coordination layer, not a containment layer.

If you're a landlord still optimizing for the five-day, 9-to-5 anchor tenant, you're operating a 2019 asset in a 2026 demand profile. The buildings winning right now have figured out two things: their busy days are busier than ever, and their slow days are slower than ever. Programming, staffing, and amenity throughput have to match that curve. Otherwise you're paying full freight to run an empty lobby on Mondays and capacity-constrained meeting rooms on Wednesdays.

If you're a tenant, the implication is more direct. Stop measuring your office investment by total square feet and full-week utilization. Measure it by Tuesday-through-Thursday throughput per dollar. That's the demand you're actually buying.

Leesman has been signaling this from the employee side for years. The Experience Gap between home and office is biggest on tasks that require focus and individual productivity, and smallest on tasks that require collaboration. Our behavioral data says employees are voting accordingly. They're at home for focus work. They come in for the things the office is genuinely better at.

So here's the call. The next 12 months in office isn't about restoring Friday or chasing some 5-day return-to-office fantasy. It's about asset operators getting honest about the demand curve they actually have and building experiences that match it.

Buildings that lean into the Tuesday-Thursday spike — collaboration capacity, outdoor space, real food and beverage on the days people are actually there — pull ahead.

Buildings that keep arguing about Friday will keep losing Monday too.

About the author

Greg Gomer

Greg Gomer is the Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer at HqO. Previously, Greg was a co-founder of American Inno. In 2012, the company was purchased by ACBJ, a subsidiary of Advance Publications. Prior to American Inno, Greg was an analyst at Fidelity Investments. He has been published in the WSJ, Fortune, TechCrunch, NBC, NPR, The Boston Globe, and more.

When not on the internet, you can find Greg skiing at Loon, relaxing on Duxbury Beach, or hanging with his kids. Greg holds a B.S. in Entrepreneurship from Babson College.

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HqO Blog • Observations

Ten Percent of Office Buildings Are Carrying 60% of the Vacancy

 

 Greg Gomer

 

 Apr 23, 2026

 

  4 min. read

 

         Greg Gomer

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JLL just published its Q1 2026 U.S. Office Market Dynamics report. One number buried on page six tells you more about the state of office than everything else in the document combined.

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10% of office buildings comprise more than 60% of the total national vacancy.

The market isn't 22% empty. A small, specific set of buildings is dragging the entire aggregate down.

Everyone is still reading the headline vacancy number like it describes one market. It doesn't. It describes two.

What's Happening

The Q1 report has a lot of good news in it if you know where to look. Net absorption was positive for the third consecutive quarter, up 3.5 million square feet. Leasing activity grew 7.6% versus Q1 2025 and is up 3.7% over the past year. Twenty-five of JLL's 52 tracked markets are now at 90% or more of their pre-pandemic leasing peaks. Technology leasing is up 35% YoY. Finance, Professional Services, and Aerospace & Defense are all exceeding pre-pandemic levels.

At the top of the market, the story is even sharper. Q1 saw more than 4 million square feet leased at starting rents above $100 per square foot, the highest Q1 volume JLL has ever recorded. Same-asset rents are up 0.8% in the past year, led by Miami/South FL (+4%), Orlando (+3%), and New York (+2.2%).

So the good buildings are full, leasing up, charging more, and setting records.

Now read the rest of the report. Office-using employment declined across every sector in the past year. Professional Services -0.2%, Finance -0.7%, Government -1%, Information -2.7%. The S&P is down roughly 5% since January. NASDAQ, 10%. JLL's own framing on the Economy page: "Recessionary conditions for office-using industries threaten leasing recovery."

The market is recovering and tightening at the same time. Both things are true. That's not a contradiction. That's bifurcation reaching its logical end.

Why It Matters

We've been watching this story play out inside our portfolio. Across HqO buildings, resource bookings were up roughly 35% year over year the week of April 12. Event bookings are up more than 50% over the past eight weeks. Service requests more than doubled.

Those aren't desk reservations. Those are tenants using buildings, hosting, gathering, and operating. In the buildings where tenants already wanted to be.

Propmodo confirmed the same pattern from a different angle. Average peak utilization across the market is just 25%. But at A+ buildings on Tuesdays, occupancy hits above 95%. In the same data set. The top-tier buildings are effectively full on the days that matter. The bottom half is at a quarter of capacity and falling further.

Here's the kicker. Propmodo also found that 44% of office space across the market is still configured as "me" space (individual workstations and private offices). Only 16% is built for collaboration. Every signal we have about how the office is actually being used in 2026 points toward collaboration, events, and gathering. And nearly half of the space in the market is built for the opposite job.

That's why the 10%-holds-60% stat lands so hard. It's not just that those buildings are old. It's that they're built wrong.

What To Do About It

Stop reading the aggregate vacancy number. It's not your number. The national headline says 22.2%. Your number is whatever your building is running at on a Tuesday, compared to the A+ building down the street, configured for what tenants actually want now.

If you're in the top decile of the market (modern layout, actual collaboration space, a real experience story), the fundamentals are moving in your direction. Rents are growing. Leasing is back to pre-pandemic norms. Tenants are using the buildings, not just leasing them. Your job is to protect that position and keep measuring.

If you're in the 10% carrying 60% of the vacancy, the JLL report is telling you what comes next. Inventory removals have quietly erased 25 million square feet of supply from the peak in late 2023. That's the market doing its own cleanup. Conversions, teardowns, repositions. Buildings that can't compete on experience are getting re-categorized out of the office market entirely.

Leesman's been measuring workplace experience across 1M+ workplace responses for over a decade. The buildings with the highest scores aren't the ones with the longest amenity list. They're the ones whose layout, programming, and operational rhythm match how tenants actually work in 2026: collaborative, intermittent, event-heavy. The buildings in the bottom decile aren't losing to remote work. They're losing to the good buildings.

Two markets. Same zip code. Don't let the aggregate tell you where you stand.

The bifurcation isn't coming. Ten percent of it is eating the other sixty.

About the author

Greg Gomer

Greg Gomer is the Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer at HqO. Previously, Greg was a co-founder of American Inno. In 2012, the company was purchased by ACBJ, a subsidiary of Advance Publications. Prior to American Inno, Greg was an analyst at Fidelity Investments. He has been published in the WSJ, Fortune, TechCrunch, NBC, NPR, The Boston Globe, and more.

When not on the internet, you can find Greg skiing at Loon, relaxing on Duxbury Beach, or hanging with his kids. Greg holds a B.S. in Entrepreneurship from Babson College.

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HqO Blog • Observations

The Biggest Firms Are Still Betting on London Offices

 Eryn Lalonde

 Apr 15, 2026

  4 min. read

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Here's What The Biggest Organisations Are Actually Betting On.

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Two headlines. The same signal. BlackRock is weighing a move to 8 Canada Square, the Canary Wharf skyscraper HSBC will vacate next year, according to the Financial Times. The world's largest asset manager is hunting for at least 600,000 square feet of London office space, with a shortlist that also includes Bishops Square near Spitalfields Market and 75 London Wall, the former Deutsche Bank headquarters.

And separately: JP Morgan has agreed terms to build a 265-metre tower in Canary Wharf, set to be the tallest building in the district, spanning 3 million square feet at a cost of £3 billion. More than half of JP Morgan's 23,000 UK staff will work there.

Easy headline: capital is still flowing into London offices. True, but incomplete.

The harder read: these aren't just relocation stories. They're a statement about what kind of space wins in a market that has never been more divided.

The Market Is Splitting – Not Shrinking

London's overall office vacancy rate is sitting close to 10%, the highest in two decades. At the same time, prime rents in the West End have climbed beyond £150 per sq ft, and City Core prime rents are up 6.8% year-on-year, now exceeding £105 per sq ft. Grade A fitted space in core City locations is achieving up to £145 per sq ft.

Those two facts aren't in tension. They're the same story told from different angles.

Vacancy is rising because the middle of the market is hollowing out. The buildings tenants are leaving aren't the trophy assets. They're the ones that can't justify their rent on experience, quality, or operational performance. The buildings tenants are fighting over are the ones that can.

Canary Wharf tells this story most sharply. The Docklands Core vacancy rate hit 18.6% in early 2025, up from 3.5% in 2017. HSBC's departure created a rare 600,000-square-foot opening in one of Europe's most finance-dense districts. Yet BlackRock is still considering it — and JP Morgan isn't leaving the district, it's doubling down with a £3bn tower that had to be negotiated down to 265 metres to satisfy London City Airport's flight path requirements. The vacancy headlines and the investment headlines are about entirely different tiers of the same market.

What These Decisions Are Really Telling Us

The three assets on BlackRock's reported shortlist sit across different London submarkets: Canary Wharf, the City fringe at Spitalfields, and the established City core at London Wall. Different locations, different character, different commuter catchments.

The common thread isn't geography. It's scale and quality. Each can house a global headquarters-grade operation. Each represents the kind of physical environment that signals institutional seriousness to talent, clients, and counterparties.

JP Morgan's decision is even more declarative. A £3bn commitment to a purpose-built tower isn't a real estate transaction. It's a 30-year thesis on what a financial institution needs its headquarters to do. And the amenity stack JP Morgan is building in tells you exactly what that thesis looks like in practice: a 19-restaurant food court with desk delivery, a pub, a medical facility, and a dedicated fitness centre — all baked into the building's core design, not bolted on as afterthoughts. This is experience infrastructure conceived at the architectural level. The building isn't just somewhere to work. It's a platform designed to keep 12,000 people engaged, productive, and present every day.

This is what the flight to quality looks like at the very top of the market. Not the cheapest Grade A option. The building that can prove it performs.

The Buildings That Win Won't Just Be in the Right Postcode

Here's where the story gets interesting for landlords watching from the other side of the transaction.

BlackRock will occupy wherever it lands for a decade or more. JP Morgan's tower will define Canary Wharf's skyline for a generation. At that scale and tenure, the building isn't just real estate. It's infrastructure for talent retention, culture-building, and operational continuity.

The landlords competing for signatures like these know this. The ones making the strongest case won't simply be offering square footage. They'll be demonstrating that their building can deliver on the full promise of a world-class occupier experience: measurable service standards, operational transparency, digital infrastructure that connects the tenant to the building from day one, and the data to prove utilization, satisfaction, and performance over time.

The Experience Gap matters most at the top of the market, because the tenants who can see it most clearly are the ones with the most options.

London's office market isn't shrinking. It's undergoing a hard reset, separating the buildings that can perform from the ones that merely exist. The biggest players are still very much in the game. The question for every landlord in the mix is whether their asset can meet the moment.

At HqO, we believe the buildings that win the next wave of lettings will be the ones that can prove their space performs. Find out where yours stands. Request an Experience Assessment.

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HqO Blog • Observations

Tenant Credits: The Strategic Infrastructure Behind CRE’s Most Loyal Buildings

 Eryn Lalonde

 Apr 13, 2026

  3 min. read

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The best landlords in the world aren't just offering great spaces. They're engineering loyalty.

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And the most underutilized tool in their arsenal isn't a new amenity, a renovation budget, or a concierge team. It's a credit program, designed from the ground up to make tenants feel like partners instead of line items.

Tenant credit programs are having a moment, but most of the industry still treats them as a perk rather than a platform. That distinction is everything.

What a Tenant Credit Program Actually Is (And Isn't)

A tenant credit program is a structured system that rewards tenants for behaviors tied to building engagement: booking conference rooms, using F&B vendors, attending community events, completing satisfaction surveys, renewing early. Credits accumulate, and tenants redeem them for services, experiences, or rent incentives within the property ecosystem.

What it isn't: a loyalty card. A loyalty card is passive. A tenant credit program is active infrastructure. It creates a behavioral feedback loop between the tenant and the building, turning every interaction into a data point and every data point into an opportunity to deepen the relationship.

The distinction matters because loyalty cards reward transactions. Credit programs reward relationships.

Why One-Off Perks Don't Compound

Most landlords default to event-driven engagement. A holiday party here. A wellness week there. A free coffee promotion in January. These initiatives aren't useless, but they don't compound. They spike engagement, then fade. And when renewal season arrives, they leave no measurable trail of tenant satisfaction to point to.

One-off perks are episodic. Tenant credit programs are continuous.

Research consistently shows that tenant satisfaction isn't built in single moments. It's built through sustained, low-friction touchpoints that accumulate into a sense of being seen and valued. A tenant who has booked 40 conference room sessions, earned 500 credits, and redeemed them for a team lunch doesn't just feel good about the building. They feel invested in it.

That's the compounding effect. Engagement builds familiarity. Familiarity builds preference. Preference drives renewal.

The Data Layer Nobody Talks About

Here's what separates the operators who deploy credit programs strategically from the ones who treat them as perks: the data.

Every credit transaction is a signal. A tenant who suddenly stops booking amenities in month eight of a twelve-month lease isn't just disengaged. They're at risk. A tenant who redeems credits for high-value experiences three months before renewal isn't just satisfied. They're signaling intent to stay.

The most sophisticated landlords aren't waiting for tenants to say they're leaving. They're watching the data and intervening before the question is even asked.

Credits as a Portfolio Strategy

Scale is where tenant credit programs go from interesting to transformative. A single-asset credit program is a nice feature. A portfolio-wide credit program is a retention system.

When tenants operate across multiple buildings in a landlord's portfolio, a unified credit architecture lets them earn and redeem across assets. That cross-building stickiness is a competitive moat. A tenant who is embedded in the credit ecosystem of three buildings in your portfolio doesn't just renew in one of them. They expand.

This is platform thinking applied to tenant relationships. Not individual transactions, but an interconnected experience economy that makes leaving the portfolio genuinely costly, not because of lease terms, but because of what the tenant would be walking away from.

The Future Belongs to Buildings That Build Loyalty by Design

The Experience Gap isn't just about amenities or aesthetics. It's about whether your building has the infrastructure to make tenants feel valued, consistently, over the full arc of their lease. Tenant credits are one of the most powerful ways to close that gap because they transform passive occupancy into active engagement.

The question isn't whether your building should have a credit program. It's whether the one you build is connected to the data and operational systems that make it intelligent.

Ready to see what loyalty infrastructure looks like at portfolio scale? Request a demo of the REX Platform.

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HqO Blog • Observations

Why Service Levels Determine Whether Employees Come Back to the Office

 Eryn Lalonde

 Mar 10, 2026

  3 min. read

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The return-to-office debate has been framed as a power struggle. Employers mandate. Employees resist. Policies get softened. Utilization stays flat.

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This framing misses the actual problem. The office isn't losing to employee stubbornness. It's losing to the home environment. And the home is winning on service.

What the Home Does Better

Leesman has surveyed hundreds of thousands of employees across the world's leading office portfolios. One finding cuts through everything else: the average home supports the average worker better than the average office.

The reason isn't that homes have better floor plates. It's that homes offer something offices chronically underdeliver: control. Employees at home control their lighting, temperature, noise levels, and break schedule. They make a coffee whenever they want. They take calls from a quiet room. They personalize their environment to match how they actually work.

The office asks them to give all of that up. And then wonders why attendance is low.

Service Quality Is the Real Battleground

The buildings winning the attendance war aren't just the newest or the tallest. They're the ones that have treated service quality as a strategic investment rather than an operating cost.

Consider what service-led buildings actually deliver. Hospitality-grade reception that makes employees feel welcomed, not processed. Food and beverage that goes beyond a vending machine — 76% of employees rate tea, coffee, and refreshment facilities as important, yet only 62% are satisfied, according to Leesman data. Consistent acoustic environments, quiet zones that actually function, responsive maintenance that resolves issues in hours rather than days.

These aren't luxuries. They're the baseline for an environment that competes with a well-set-up home office.

The Service Charge Question

Service charges are frequently the flashpoint in landlord-occupier negotiations. Tenants push back on costs. Landlords struggle to justify them. The conversation typically happens in isolation from the broader question of what those charges are actually supposed to deliver.

Here's the reframe. The service charge isn't a cost of occupancy. It's the funding mechanism for the environment that earns attendance. If employees aren't coming to the office, tenant companies aren't getting ROI from their real estate spend regardless of what the service charge is. The more important question is whether the services being delivered are good enough to make the in-office experience genuinely better than the alternative.

What This Means for Landlords

The service levels on offer inside a building are now a direct driver of occupier ROI. Tenants are being asked by their boards to justify real estate spend at a time when utilization is scrutinized. The landlords who can demonstrate that their buildings drive attendance through measurable service quality have a fundamentally different conversation than those who cannot.

This is where experience infrastructure pays for itself. Not as a line item to be negotiated down. As the mechanism that turns a building from a cost center into a business asset for the tenants inside it.

The office doesn't need to be home. But it needs to be better than staying home. That's a service delivery problem. And it's solvable.

Download the REX Platform Strategy Resource Library to explore the frameworks behind service design, tenant journey mapping, and experience-led portfolio operations → Download

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HqO Blog • Observations

Two Types of Landlords: One Is Building Tomorrow

 Eryn Lalonde

 Jan 28, 2026

  2 min. read

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Commercial real estate is splitting into two species. One is managing decline. The other is building the future.

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The difference isn't capital or portfolio size. It's operating philosophy. Legacy landlords treat real estate as a transaction—lease space, collect rent, repeat. Experiential organizations treat it as a service platform where tenants are customers and experience becomes the competitive moat.

The Mindset Gap

Legacy organizations optimize for lease execution. Tenants are rent payers. Service is reactive. Amenities are fixed. Tech tools are disconnected. Operations run in siloes.

Experiential organizations optimize for tenant lifetime value. Leasing is the beginning, not the end. Service is proactive and hospitality-driven. Experiences are personalized and evolving. Unified platforms power identity, analytics, and engagement. Teams align around tenant health metrics.

This structural difference shows up in five critical areas.

Five Operational Differences That Matter

Branded Product Lines
Experiential landlords standardize workspaces, conferencing, and amenities under branded offerings. Conference room booking in Boston works the same in London. That's platform thinking.

Experience Teams
Legacy orgs rely on property managers juggling everything. Experiential orgs deploy Customer Experience Managers, Tenant Success Managers, and Retention Teams who measure satisfaction and intervene before churn happens.

Tenant-Centered Discovery
Legacy landlords ask what square footage you need. Experiential organizations ask what outcomes you're trying to achieve—then tailor space, services, and programming accordingly through quarterly business reviews.

Building-Wide Hospitality
Legacy landlords restrict communication to one contact and treat service as ticketing. Experiential organizations provide real-time support to all users, turning every interaction into loyalty rather than just closing tickets.

Technology as Infrastructure
Experiential organizations build unified platforms with structured data layers, purpose-built CRMs managing every tenant relationship, modular product suites, and digital applications extending access to all building personas. Legacy orgs buy software. Experiential orgs build systems.

The Outcome Gap

These operational differences compound into measurable divergence. Experiential organizations track tenant health scores, predict churn risk, and intervene proactively. They measure engagement and satisfaction like SaaS companies measure product usage.

Legacy organizations discover churn when tenants give notice. By then it's too late.

The market rewards this difference through premium rents, higher occupancy, reduced vacancy costs, and longer lease terms. Experiential portfolios aren't managing assets—they're building platforms that create switching costs through experience quality competitors can't replicate.

Which Model Are You Building?

The shift toward experience-led real estate demands more than new amenities. It requires a fundamentally new operating model built around tenants, not leases.

REX provides the framework: a scalable, tech-enabled approach to transforming portfolios into experience-first platforms. But frameworks only work when leadership commits to the shift.

The question facing every portfolio in 2026: Are you managing leases, or building relationships? Only one has a future.

Discover Which Type of Organization You're Building

Take the Experience Assessment to benchmark your portfolio against experiential organizations and see where operational gaps are costing you retention and performance.

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HqO Blog • Observations

The Class B Renaissance: Why Smart Technology Is the Great Equalizer in the Amenity Wars

 HqO

 Nov 4, 2025

  3 min. read

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The Evolution of Office Building Amenities: A Four-Decade Arms Race

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The commercial real estate amenity wars didn't start with the pandemic; they've been escalating since the 1980s. In the office building market, what qualifies as Class A today becomes Class B tomorrow as tenant expectations continuously evolve. This natural progression affects every asset class: a premium office space from the 1990s doesn't meet modern workplace standards, even with prime location and substantial square footage.

Why Class B Office Buildings Are Gaining Momentum in 2025

Today's office leasing market reveals a compelling story. While Class A office towers command record rents — exceeding $300 per square foot in Manhattan and $100 per square foot in Boston — a renaissance is emerging in Class B+ properties. These aren't outdated brick-and-beam warehouses, but strategically repositioned buildings that recognize a fundamental market reality: not every company can afford top-tier office rent, but every company demands a premium workplace experience.

Understanding the Experience Gap in Commercial Real Estate

The Experience Gap represents the growing divide between tenant expectations for their workplace and what traditional building operations can deliver. For Class B office building owners, this gap has historically seemed impossible to bridge. The question becomes: how can you compete with Class A amenities — rooftop basketball courts, private clubs, and white-glove concierge services — when your building economics are fundamentally different?

How PropTech Levels the Playing Field for Class B Properties

Technology as a Service Delivery Multiplier

The answer doesn't match Class A office amenities dollar-for-dollar. Smart building technology has become the equalizer, enabling Class B+ properties to deliver sophisticated tenant experience programs that would have been cost-prohibitive just five years ago.

Winning buildings in this segment share common traits:

• Seamless digital building access and visitor management
• Responsive maintenance through connected systems
• Curated community events with digital engagement tracking
• Real-time tenant communication beyond traditional email
• On-demand service delivery integrated with building operations

The CRM Approach to Tenant Experience

The most successful Class B office repositioning strategies treat tenant experience as an ongoing relationship, not a one-time transaction at lease signing. They invest in tenant experience platforms — essentially a CRM for commercial real estate — that create connective tissue between property management teams and occupants.

What Drives Return-to-Office Success in Class B Buildings

Companies returning to the office across major markets aren't just evaluating physical space; they're assessing the complete workplace ecosystem. PropTech platforms enable Class B buildings to deliver:

• Operational responsiveness that rivals concierge service
• Proactive communication about building updates and events
• Community building through data-driven engagement
• Service orchestration that feels premium without premium costs

The New Competitive Landscape: Intelligence Beats Infrastructure

What's emerging is a commercial real estate market where operational excellence matters as much as lobby aesthetics. A 30-year-old office building equipped with smart building technology and attentive tenant service can win leasing competitions against newer, flashier competitors. Tenant retention increasingly depends on hundreds of positive micro-interactions rather than a single showcase amenity.

Key Takeaways: The Future of Class B Office Space

The Class B office space renaissance isn't about pretending to be Class A. It's about recognizing that in an experience-driven workplace market, intelligence and responsiveness are their own form of premium positioning. With the right tenant experience platform and technology foundation, any building can deliver an exceptional workplace experience, regardless of asset class.

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The Future of Experiential CRE

Commercial Real Estate (CRE) is at a crossroads. Decades of technological and market shifts have created a widening Experience Gap — the delta between what tenants need and what landlords deliver. This gap costs the industry billions every year and will determine which owners thrive in the next cycle.

At HqO, we’ve spent the past three years working with the world’s leading property owners to close this gap. The result is REX, a proven operating model and methodology that empowers landlords to deliver continual tenant success through outcomes-driven operations.

The Experience Gap

The Experience Gap occurs when tenant expectations evolve faster than CRE platforms can adapt. Today’s tenants demand personalized, data-driven, and seamless experiences that extend far beyond the lease. Yet many landlords still operate through a transactional model focused on occupancy rather than outcomes.

By contrast, Experiential Landlords are emerging as a new category of market leaders. They view tenants as customers, not contracts — building long-term partnerships centered on success. Their platforms are dynamic, customer-first, and powered by data.

By 2030, this divide between Transactional and Experiential landlords will define the industry. Only those who evolve will remain relevant.

The REX Operating Model

To help landlords make this shift, HqO created the REX Methodology — an operating model that starts with desired outcomes and works backward through every aspect of tenant engagement.

Outcomes → Journeys → Workflows → Data → Insights → Iteration

1. Outcomes: Define what tenants are trying to achieve.
2. Journeys: Map every step of the tenant lifecycle.
3. Workflows: Design automated processes to deliver results.
4. Data: Capture signals through HqO’s Digital Grid.
5. Insights: Turn analytics into proactive intelligence.
6. Iteration: Continuously improve with every cycle.

The REX approach transforms how CRE platforms operate — replacing fragmented systems with a unified CRM for CRE designed to manage relationships, measure success, and drive value across every interaction.

Powering the Experiential Platform

HqO’s CRM for CRE translates REX into action. It unifies the core elements of an experiential operation:

• Tenant & User Pages – Deliver visibility into every relationship.
• Vendor Management – Integrate compliance and partnerships seamlessly.
• Omni-Channel Workflows – Connect visitor access, amenities, and communications.
• Commerce Tools – Enable service credits and cross-location flexibility.
• Data & Reporting – Leverage the Digital Grid for AI-ready insights and dashboards.

Together, these capabilities give landlords a system of record and action — a modern operating platform built for continual improvement.

Close the Experience Gap

The next CRE cycle belongs to platforms that move fast, innovate continuously, and deliver measurable tenant outcomes. REX gives you the roadmap.

Download the REX Platform Strategy Templates to start closing your Experience Gap today.

Ready to see what HqO can do for you? Get in touch with us today to schedule a demo to discover the first purpose-built CRM for CRE.

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On October 16, 2025, a select group of leaders will gather for STRATA, a summit cohosted with the MIT Center for Real Estate

What comes after the built world we inherited?

To open the day, Steve Weikal, Industry Chair of the Real Estate Transformation Lab at MIT’s Center for Real Estate and Managing Partner of MET Fund II, will frame the conversation. A longtime voice at the intersection of innovation and real estate, Steve has helped define what’s next for cities, infrastructure, and the spaces we inhabit.

We spoke with Steve about the transitions ahead, and the opportunities they present.

Why STRATA, and why now?

“STRATA isn’t just another real estate conference. It’s a forum where perspectives collide – real estate leaders, technologists, futurists, civic innovators. That kind of cross-pollination is rare. And it’s exactly what we need right now to start envisioning how dramatically the built world will transform in the coming decade.”

The Built Environment Transition

“We see three powerful forces reshaping the landscape:

1. The unprecedented impacts of climate change
   
2. Breakthroughs in science and technology
   
3. Sweeping socio-geographic shifts

The convergence of these meta-trends will fundamentally reorder how and where we live, work, and play. It’s nothing less than a global transformation.”

Why MIT’s Center for Real Estate?

“The Center sits at the intersection of real estate, planning, architecture, technology, science, and innovation – truly unparalleled in academia. But just as important, MIT has a tradition of partnering with industry in deeply practical ways. This collaboration ensures research doesn’t just stay in journals, but that it shapes strategy, policy, and investment.”

Technology’s Role in a Living, Breathing Built World

“Prof. Dennis Frenchman once said: ‘Buildings should be more like ecosystems than machines. They should respond to their inhabitants’ needs before those needs are even consciously recognized.’

Thanks to advances in AI and data systems, this isn’t science fiction anymore. Tomorrow’s buildings will be intelligent ecosystems – learning, adapting, and evolving in sync with the people inside them. That shift will redefine not only design, but how we experience the built environment itself.”

Startups to Watch at STRATA

“Some of the most compelling ideas today are coming from early-stage ventures, and STRATA will showcase several leading examples:

• Active Surfaces: Thin-film solar that is lightweight, low-cost, and nearly as efficient as traditional silicon.
  
• GaiaAI: Using LiDAR, AI, and robotics to transform how we measure, manage and monetize timberland.

Digital Rights Management: Enabling property owners to secure and monetize the digital layer in and around their buildings – the foundation of emerging AR and mixed reality ecosystems.”

About Steve Weikal

Steve Weikal is a lecturer, researcher, and thought leader driving innovation in real estate. At MIT, he chairs the Real Estate Transformation Lab and teaches the Proptech Ventures course. As Managing Partner of MET Fund II, he invests in early-stage startups advancing the built environment transition.

Previously, Steve led industry relations at MIT’s Center for Real Estate, produced the MIT World Real Estate Forum, and founded MIT Real Disruption, a landmark conference series on real estate technology. His insights have been featured in USA Today, The Boston Globe, TechInsider, and at global forums including ULI, CoreNet, and CREtech.

Steve holds dual master’s degrees from MIT (Real Estate Development and City Planning) and a JD from Suffolk University Law School.

The Invitation

The built environment is at a tipping point. Climate, technology, and society are rewriting the rules and with them, the opportunities.

On October 16, 2025, at the Boston Marriott Cambridge, STRATA will bring together the leaders at the forefront of this transformation. And it begins with Steve Weikal’s call to rethink the built world itself.

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The commercial real estate (CRE) industry has always reflected the broader economy. Today, that reflection is sharper than ever, with artificial intelligence not only disrupting workflows but reshaping the very foundations of real estate. For CRE leaders, the question isn’t if AI is changing the industry but how fast and what opportunities it unlocks.

A Tale of Two Markets

Consider the current divide: in California, nearly 36% of commercial projects are stalled or canceled due to regulations and tariffs. Yet in Manhattan, Class A office landlords are projecting the strongest rental growth in decades. This “tale of two cities” highlights how local challenges collide with global forces, and increasingly, AI in commercial real estate is one of those forces.

AI as Strategic Infrastructure

Too often, conversations about AI in commercial real estate focus only on chatbots or back-office automation. But AI is quickly becoming something much bigger. This shift points toward what some call the Quantum City: a new urban paradigm where AI, data, and physical infrastructure converge into living systems. In this model, CRE isn’t just bricks and mortar; it’s a responsive network, dynamically connected to tenants, technologies, and the broader economy. For leaders, this represents a vision of real estate as strategic civic infrastructure, powering not just workplaces but entire communities.

Economic Signals CRE Leaders Can’t Ignore

Capital is flowing in ways that underscore a seismic shift. Carlyle’s latest $9 billion fund is avoiding office, hotel, and retail in favor of residential, self-storage, and industrial, all with an eye on AI-powered infrastructure. Meanwhile, commercial and multifamily mortgage originations jumped more than 60% year-over-year, signaling renewed liquidity.

At the same time, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are forecasting a record $365 billion in CapEx by 2025. For CRE, this means innovation is no longer optional. CRE leaders who embrace AI and workplace innovation will be better positioned to adapt to these capital flows and meet evolving market demands.

What CRE Leaders Should Do Next

The opportunity is twofold:

1. Inside the enterprise — Deploy AI to improve operations, from property management efficiency to personalized tenant experience. The winners will train teams not just to use AI, but to use it adaptively and transformatively.

2. Across assets — Reimagine properties as part of the AI economy. Real estate must be framed as active infrastructure that enables business transformation, not just a container for it.

Looking Ahead

AI isn’t simply a passing trend. It’s redefining the rules of economic gravity. For CRE leaders, the challenge is to cut through the noise and position portfolios for long-term resilience. Those who treat real estate as part of the AI-driven workplace technology ecosystem won’t just ride the next cycle; they’ll define it.

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