The Nightmare
Three buildings. Three property management systems. Three sets of dashboards. And not one of them could answer the question that actually mattered:
which offices should we keep paying for?
The Property Director and Head of ESG faced a classic portfolio trap. Leatherhead had 617 seats and a 2027 lease decision looming. London and Manchester were smaller, busier, and cheaper — but nobody had a cross-site view. Data lived in silos. Reporting frameworks competed. And the board kept asking for evidence that the estate team couldn't cleanly produce.
Every quarter was the same: collect data, reconcile systems, produce a report nobody could act on. The data collection became the job. The actual decisions kept getting deferred.
In Their Words
"We had three buildings and three completely different stories about how they were performing. D-XPERT gave us one view, and for the first time, it was a view we could actually act on. The Leatherhead decision was already half-made in our heads. Now we had the numbers to back it up at board level. That's the difference between a report and a recommendation."
Property Director
Major UK Construction & Built Environment Firm
The DIREK Fix
DIREK connected D-XPERT™ across all three offices - Leatherhead, London, and Manchester - normalising attendance, utilisation, and cost data into a single portfolio view for Q4 2025. No more reconciling spreadsheets.
No more separate site reports that couldn't be compared. One decision-grade view of the whole estate. Then D-XPERT did what dashboards can't: it told them what to do.
The output wasn't a data dump. It was a ranked verdict - site by site, zone by zone:
1. Leatherhead: Fix / Exit
617 seats, 108 daily. Occupancy 18%. Cost per occupant ≈£23k. Utilisation down 17%.
2. London: Keep
164 seats, 41% occupancy, attendance up 15%. Desk use over 95%.
3. Manchester: Keep
Site costs £7k per occupant vs £23k at Leatherhead. Attendance up 34%. Shared spaces 54.6%.
4. Meeting rooms across all sites: oversupplied
Averaging just 24.5% peak utilisation portfolio-wide. Reconfiguration, not expansion, is the answer
5. Leatherhead call booths at 49.3% utilisation
The highest-demand zone at the site nobody thought was working hard. Hybrid workers need quiet space, not more desks
For the first time, every lease decision, consolidation move, and CAPEX request had metered evidence behind it - not a consultant's opinion or a committee's instinct.
Impact
In-Depth Analysis
London & Manchester hit peak-of-peak demand above 100%, with Manchester also showing the highest pressure across the portfolio. Overall utilisation averages 24.5%, making this the most underused zone portfolio-wide. Meanwhile, Leatherhead’s most in-demand zone points to a quiet-space deficit, and some collaboration areas remain underused despite the ongoing push for more collaborative working.
Portfolio Verdict
Zone Utilisation by Site
FAQ
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