The digital estate for people: revealing the art of the possible

In the context of the current squeeze on finances, increased health and safety vigilance and net zero carbon targets, the role of data could not be more important for construction property owners and estate managers in 2025. However, developing the so-called ‘digital estate’ to yield long-term sustainable value from buildings needs a robust strategy and clear-sighted implementation.

An event organised by the CIOB as part of its Client Strategy at the recent Futurebuild conference explored how that can be achieved. The discussion was expertly chaired by David Philp (Chief Value Officer at Bentley Systems). Four expert panellists – Ayo Allu (Owner at AAA Project Services), Graham Lewis (Chief Officer University Environments and Property at Cardiff Metropolitan University), Johan Joubert (Digital Placemaking Programme Manager at British Land) and Shrikant Sharma (Founder and CEO at SmartViz) – shared their insights and experience.

Extracting best value from an estate or portfolio of buildings requires strategic planning.

This is easier said than done, though, when management budgets are always limited. You barely have the resource to keep up with day-to-day issues, let alone meet expectations for ever-more effective and efficient operations over the longer term.

You end up on the back foot, reacting to problems that, if only you’d had the capacity to check regularly, could have been spotted months ago and dealt with at a fraction of the cost and disruption.

Given this state of, as Ayo Allu put it, “reactive maintenance”, the prospect of reaching operational net zero and making the kinds of changes that might improve outcomes is a distant dream to most.

The fix

A pre-condition of overcoming this impasse is good data. Having the right kind of data at the right time, with the bandwidth to act on it, allows you to anticipate issues before they become problems. It gives you a robust evidence base that cuts through bias, ego and the loudest voices in the room. In theory, this enables improved outcomes across the board and frees up resources.

Data, data everywhere

The irony is that estates managers are, as Graham Lewis put it, “drowning in data.” They come from many sources, including utility bills, the building management system (BMS), testing and commissioning reports, condition surveys and the accretion of as-built drawings over time.

Less obvious but often plentiful are metadata about the way occupiers use the building, which are encoded in desk- and room-booking systems, timetables and schedules.

If there’s no shortage of data, what’s stopping estates and portfolio managers from using them to get ahead of the curve?

The panel identified four closely related problems.

First, the relevant data are locked away in professional silos, meaning they are not shared and so stagnate.

Second, different systems are procured in isolation, meaning that estates and portfolios end up with multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. The data aren’t structured consistently so that, even when they do escape their silos, they are hard to integrate.

Third, when there is so much data to consider, it is hard to know how best to interrogate them for your desired outcomes.

And finally, once data is fit to use, the problems they reveal might have moved on. “You end up chasing your own tail,” said Shrikant Sharma.

People-centred strategy and implementation

The key to unlocking better outcomes is to have a purposeful strategy centred on the people affected – the occupiers.

Setting up this change of focus starts with what Graham Lewis described as “RIBA Stage 0 stuff” – right at the very start of any new-build, refurbishment or maintenance project when you identify and formalize your fundamental organisational objectives. These purposes almost always have the wellbeing of humans at their heart.

For example, research at Harvard University shows that raised CO₂ levels from respiratory emissions impair cognitive function and poor air quality promotes sickness. Avoiding these are highly desirable, and so you should be monitoring heat, CO₂, and humidity to identify where and when rooms need to be better ventilated.

For Johan Joubert, the lightbulb moment came when British Land switched from a time-based to usage-based monitoring strategy to underpin their ‘smart building platform’. Everything flowed from there.

For example, they discovered that out-of-hours energy consumption was higher than you might predict from usage figures. Having the data gave them an empirical evidence base, allowing them to set up feedback loops for continuous improvements. The onsite team intervened and fine-tuned, resulting in a 32% decrease in overall consumption – important for British Land’s corporate objective for environmental sustainability.

Making data useful

To do any of that you must overcome the problems that typically stop data from being useful.

Agreeing an overarching estate management strategy should motivate the gatekeepers of siloed data to open up. After all, doing so stands to make their jobs more successful and rewarding.

However, a huge dump of data can paralyse action. A better approach, said Shrikant Sharma, is to start by assessing the data you need and then to limit your search to harvesting just them. According to Sharma, this will yield about 80% of the information required.

The missing 20% can be gathered by installing new systems, which is likely cheaper and less disruptive than many fear. Whether to measure occupancy patterns, relative humidity, CO₂ levels, or anything else, there’s probably a ‘peel-and-stick’ sensor to do the job. With long battery lives, these gizmos connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) transmit data to a central hub where they can be monitored in real time and processed.

Next, data need to be configured. British Land, for example, has developed a centralised digital platform to monitor the properties it manages. To work, input data must be structured and thereafter kept to uniform standards. Suppliers carrying out any subsequent repair, maintenance or construction work must structure their input data to the same uniform standards.

Data also need to be visualised on an intuitive, centralised dashboard. Shrikant Sharma recommended overlaying the data on a 2- or 3-D representation of the spaces for real-time readings, with background applications to analyse, for example, trends over time or anomalous events.

This makes the data fit to optimise utilisation rates and, from there, organisational outcomes. Monitoring can be automated, with deviations from the norm programmed to either self-correct or set off alarm bells.

What’s more, the intuitive presentation of data allows anyone with access to explore the current state of play and where there are problems or pinch points. At the moment, access tends to be constrained to just the asset managers. In the future, though, it could be extended to occupants. For example, Johan Joubert said that British Land are currently contemplating sharing real-time data from their smart building platform with their tenants.

In summary

Of course, the digital estate is not a silver bullet. There are problems, not least in the residential sector, where, as Ayo Allu pointed out, rights to privacy and quiet enjoyment clash with efforts to gather data. You can see the potential, though. Not only could utilisation feedback inform future modifications and designs, it could also improve health outcomes that benefit tenants and, indeed, the National Health Service.

The aggregation of data at scale is where the real savings and opportunities arise. This approach is driving the estate strategy at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where data analysis has revealed the opportunities arising from current underutilisation, and potential savings to be made in addressing out-of-hours energy usage.

Their response? To stop building new space, saving £5m in the first year, and to “turn stuff off”, saving 860 megawatts of power in six months. The digital estate really does reveal, as Graham Lewis put it, “the art of the possible.”