The commercial real estate landscape is experiencing a seismic shift. The pandemic, the continuing persistence of hybrid work, and rising energy costs have meant that many building operators are facing downward revenue pressure and rising costs.
"Owner operators are navigating a complex environment marked by several pivotal challenges"
Ashley Evans SVP Global Business Development Strategic Alliances at New Era explained.
Indeed, a 2025 McKinsey report found that a total of $800 billion in real terms of value is at stake by 2030, and the total value of office space is expected to decline by 26% from 2019 to 2030.
This is not a death knell for commercial real-estate owner-operators, it is however a wake-up call, reminding us that the old model of purely providing a space to work in is no longer enough. Customers and tenants want more from their real estate leases and commitments. Hybrid work created a vacuum filled by the desire for integrated and flexible work experiences.
By partnering with managed service providers (MSP), commercial real estate owner-operators can harness new IT capabilities that reduce costs and provide new integrated collaborative experiences that give workers more reasons to return to the office.
The Complex Challenge Landscape
Traditional office spaces are struggling to justify their existence in an era where productivity no longer requires physical presence.
The statistics paint a stark picture:
"Less than 50% of knowledge workers actually work full-time an offices"
Evans said.
Equally, our time away from the office has allowed workers to really examine what they really want out of the office for the days they are in it.
"Only 14% of the global workforce are looking for a traditional corporate workplace experience," Evans explained.
One of the major causes of dissatisfaction with working in an office is the aging infrastructure. Workers want the flexibility of a “WeWork” experience within their corporate facilities. They want to schedule a meeting space based on the purpose of the collaboration, not just to book a conference room. They want the technology to simply work, behind the scenes without any special knowledge of the platform. This includes getting from the curb through security and to the correct meeting space.
Building owners with legacy infrastructure are struggling to meet the diverse and complex needs of the modern work customers and they are competing with greenfield, smart buildings, LEED certified and built on a modern data architecture that leverages AI across the entire customer value chain.
"We believe there is a counter intuitive market dynamic occurring.
"Over 70% of owner-operators are actually not ready for the technology that they need or their customers want"
Evans said.
Many owner-operators engineer their space for the generic buyer experience, rather than specializing with best-in-breed space design and IT solutions. The lack of standards and integration of technology into the spaces makes it hard to deliver a flexible and positive experience for the tenants.
"The distribution and sprawl of legacy infrastructure technologies creates a complex web of systems that becomes really challenging to manage effectively, owner operators are playing the proverbial “whack a mole” support game, which simply isn't scalable" Evans noted.
Market pressures and the financial burden of maintaining legacy capabilities forces owner operators to ask; when is the right time to modernize. The cost benefit analysis requires a multi-year strategy with potentially new business models - where IT is a function of the owner operator's strategy - to differentiate and provide value added services to its tenants.
MSPs: The Fast Track to Modernization
Rather than dealing with fragmented, multi-vendor setups, working with an MSP can provide a catalogue of capabilities, solutions that integrate everything from the network infrastructure, to physical security, smart IoT devices, building management systems, collaboration technologies, HVAC, and energy and sustainability monitoring.
Plugged in together, these solutions can deliver outcomes that extend beyond their primary use cases. For example, in a meeting room fitted with Cisco collaboration devices, the occupancy sensors can feed data directly into the building management system to automatically adjust HVAC settings for optimal comfort and energy usage.
Partnering with an MSP like New Era provides a single source solution for owner operators that include; experience design, development of the catalogue of IT capabilities, through to the coordinated deployment of the solution and into the full managed services of the technology for the owner operator. Owner operators want a managed, standardized view of the delivery model but also a single pane of glass integrating often disparate technologies into one unified platform and a single source of truth.
