Most companies still size their office the same way they did a decade ago: count the employees, add a buffer, and sign the lease. Meanwhile, the actual desks and rooms sit far emptier than that math assumes. Kisi’s live Office Occupancy Index, which tracks daily badge-in data across the US, has the national average sitting at just over half full on any given workday.
Office space rightsizing is the alternative: aligning square footage to how a workplace is actually used. The tools below are what make that alignment possible with real data instead of a guess.
What Is Office Space Rightsizing?
Office space rightsizing means adjusting a company’s real estate footprint, adding, cutting, or reconfiguring it, to match actual usage patterns rather than headcount or a lease signed years ago. It differs from plain downsizing in an important way. Downsizing cuts space to save money, regardless of whether the cut fits how people actually work. Rightsizing can mean less space, more space, or the same space arranged differently. The only requirement is that the decision follows real usage data instead of assumptions.
The Best AI-Powered Tools For Office Space Rightsizing
Five platforms show up again and again in real rightsizing decisions, each solving a different piece of the data problem.
- VergeSense: best for portfolio-wide rightsizing decisions backed by predictive modelling
- Density: best for precise, real-time occupancy counts
- Basking: best for multi-source data at portfolio scale
- HubStar: best for hybrid-work metrics tied to space planning
- Occuspace: best for benchmarking your utilisation against industry averages
VergeSense
VergeSense tops this list because it turns utilisation data into a rightsizing decision teams can actually defend to finance. Fresenius Medical Care’s headquarters consolidation is the clearest example. The healthcare company suspected one of its two Boston-area headquarters buildings sat underused but needed hard data before acting on it. Four months of VergeSense sensor data showed the smaller building was running at just 20% utilisation. Fresenius terminated the lease early and now saves more than $6 million a year in avoided costs.
That kind of confidence comes from scale. VergeSense has analysed more than 250+ million square feet of office space and built its own Large Spatial Model, trained specifically on years of workplace usage patterns, to power Predictive Planning. This enables modelling what a consolidation, a floor cut, or a redesign would actually look like before anyone signs off on it. The platform also unifies sensors, Wi-Fi, badge, booking, and videoconferencing data into one view rather than asking a team to reconcile four separate reports.
VergeSense at a glance
- AI-powered sensors track usage at the desk, room, floor, and zone level
- Predictive planning models right-sizing scenarios before a lease decision gets made
- Unifies sensors, Wi-Fi, badge, booking, and videoconferencing data into one occupancy layer
- Native integrations with Eptura, Robin, OfficeSpace, Aruba, and Microsoft Places
- Built for CRE leaders, workplace teams, and CFOs evaluating a lease renewal or consolidation
Density
Density’s radar-based sensors deliver real-time, high-accuracy occupancy counts at entrances and high-traffic areas, without capturing personally identifiable data. It’s a narrower tool than VergeSense. Rather than a full rightsizing platform, Density supplies one precise data stream that teams can feed into a broader analysis. That makes it a fit for organisations that already have a rightsizing process in place and want sharper counts as one input into it.
Basking
Basking combines Wi-Fi, access control, and sensor data into one portfolio-wide view, built for organisations managing rightsizing decisions across multiple sites. For a company comparing utilisation across 10 regional offices, a single consistent data source matters more than any one office’s granular detail, and that’s the gap Basking fills.
HubStar
HubStar is a workplace management platform built specifically around the metrics that hybrid-work rightsizing decisions depend on: occupancy, utilisation rate, attendance patterns, and desk-sharing ratios. Where VergeSense layers AI-driven prediction on top of that data, HubStar focuses on making the underlying metrics clear and actionable for teams building a hybrid workspace plan from scratch.
Occuspace
Occuspace runs one of the industry’s largest independent benchmarks, tracking utilisation across more than 40 million square feet and 10,000 workspaces nationwide. That scale is useful beyond Occuspace’s own sensor data. It gives a workplace team something to compare their own numbers against, so a utilisation rate reads as a signal rather than an isolated figure.
How To Build A Data-Backed Rightsizing Plan
A rightsizing decision is only as good as the data behind it. Four metrics show up in nearly every credible rightsizing plan.
Occupancy and vacancy. Occupancy is how many workspaces (desks, rooms, and zones) are in active use at a given moment, and vacancy is the inverse. Consistently low occupancy in a zone points toward downsizing or repurposing it, while consistently high occupancy points toward expanding it.
Utilisation rate. This is occupied space divided by total available space over a period of time, tracked as both an average and a peak. It’s the metric that actually answers the rightsizing question: how many of the desks a company already has are getting used.
Attendance patterns. These track when people are actually on-site, by team and by day, rather than what the hybrid policy says should happen. That data, pulled from badge access, Wi-Fi, or booking systems, tends to diverge from the plan in ways that matter for space decisions.
Sharing ratios. These measure how many people are assigned to each desk or workspace. Benchmarked by space type (focus zones, collaboration areas, meeting rooms), the right ratio can free up real space without anyone losing a place to sit.
A platform that captures all four in one place gives a rightsizing decision far more weight than one built on a single metric. With the national office vacancy rate still sitting above 18%, most companies have more room to work with than their current floor plan assumes. The data above is how you find out how much.
FAQ
What is office space rightsizing?
Office space rightsizing means adjusting a company’s office footprint, whether that’s cutting square footage, adding it, or reconfiguring it, to match how the space is actually used rather than headcount or a lease signed years ago. It relies on utilisation data rather than assumptions.
How is rightsizing different from downsizing?
Downsizing cuts space to reduce cost, regardless of whether the cut matches how people actually work. Rightsizing uses utilisation data to decide what the right amount and configuration of space actually is. Sometimes that means shedding space, sometimes adding it, and sometimes just rearranging what’s already there.
What is a good office utilisation rate?
There’s no single universal benchmark, but many workplace teams treat a utilisation rate that consistently sits under 50% as a strong signal that the space no longer matches how it’s actually used. Kisi’s live Office Occupancy Index has put the national average at just over half full on a typical workday, which gives most companies a useful baseline to compare against.
How much can rightsizing save on real estate costs?
It varies by company and portfolio, but the savings are rarely trivial. Fresenius Medical Care saved more than $6 million a year after data revealed one of its two headquarters buildings was running at just 20% utilisation. With the national office vacancy rate still above 18%, that kind of gap between leased space and actual use is common.
