In Q1 2020, the commercial real estate sector had quite a lot on its plate: moratoriums on rent, large areas of cities going quiet due to lockdowns, and major debates sparking about the very future of the office.

A time of stress and disruption, for sure. At the same time, other voices on the question of ‘People, Planet and Profit’ were also beginning to be heard across the sector, with debates over sustainable building and creating a greener urban habitat getting louder.

To help find answers, TechPros carried out a survey of UK-based Land & Property practitioners to get their views on these issues. We carried out the research with the support of Esri UK, a global software, data and services company that provides digital mapping and location analysis technology to leading real estate businesses around the world.

This eBook is the result. It aims to combine the insights of practitioners working at the frontline of all this change with Esri’s deep knowledge of the emerging potential of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) as a way to make location the new secret weapon for practitioners to rise to the challenges.

We are very grateful to all the Land & Property sector professionals who gave their knowledge and insights for us to draw our conclusions. While over 30 market participants were interviewed and their views captured, this final report is based on the perceptive remarks of the following five key players in the UK commercial real estate market.

For telecom organisations, successful network operations and maintenance not only includes optimising communication networks, but also the people, processes, and systems that maintain and manage telecom networks. Discover how ArcGIS can meet your organisations’ next gen network initiatives and digitally transform your business.

The next generation office is a workplace that energises employee performance. Here, workers easily talk about new ideas and plan ways to implement them. In this smart environment, everything is designed to help workers do their best. The facility’s operating system seems to intuitively respond to the needs of its inhabitants. Various systems work together to ensure faster service delivery and site safety and security.

Creating a visual building inventory for maintenance, accountability and efficiency. The 80/20 rule in building maintenance holds that 20 percent of the problems consume 80 percent of your resources. Seeing where and when each problem is occurring, and reacting quickly, can turn this ratio around.

Daily operations need to quickly adjust to changing conditions including last-minute requests and unexpected resource unavailability and delays. A geographic perspective allows you to easily see the location of the worker nearest the call and quickly assign that worker to respond. This level of flexibility results in exceptional customer service and compliance with service-level agreements.

GIS does much more than map point A to point B. For instance, users can add other layers of information, such as private road networks and asset locations, to street maps. GIS apps combine this data and calculate optimised routes that fieldworkers see on their mobile devices, even when disconnected.

Ordinary people who made a difference during the COVID-19 lockdown.