CBRE’s Industrious Bet Points To A Larger Truth About The Future Of Occupant Experience

The moment an employee walks through a building's front door, they are already forming a judgment. Is the lobby welcoming or purely functional? Does someone acknowledge them by name, or are they waved through a barrier? These seconds matter, and the industry knows it. Brokers and landlords have long invested in making strong first impressions. But what has historically received less attention is the substance of the experience that follows.

Now, CBRE has decided that this does matter. The brokerage has launched Experience by Industrious, a hospitality-led offering for commercial building owners and occupiers, leveraging the expertise of Industrious – the coworking operator it acquired roughly a year ago. The proposition spans the full spectrum of in-building experience: arrival interactions, food and beverage, conferencing, wellness, and amenity management. The goal is simple but significant: making the office somewhere employees genuinely want to be.

This is a signal that commercial real estate is fundamentally repositioning the office as an experience product, and that the race to own the occupant relationship has begun in earnest.

Employers increasingly recognize that employees are, in effect, customers of the workplace. Attracting people to the office requires a compelling value proposition, and the friction points that erode it – an unwelcoming lobby, a chaotic amenity floor, an elevator wait that stretches to ten minutes or more – are now being treated as strategic problems rather than operational inconveniences. Buildings that fail to meet this bar are losing the talent retention argument before the working day has even started. Research from MIT Sloan Management Review reinforces this point, finding that when it comes to retaining staff, emotional needs and workplace experience outweigh pay as a driver of whether employees stay at an organization or start looking elsewhere.

Verdantix has been tracking this shift closely, and our forthcoming report on innovation in user experience frames the new landscape through the concept of the experience operating system: the convergence of software, data and integrated services that manage the full occupant life cycle. Rather than treating arrival, engagement, amenity use and departure as separate operational concerns, leading building operators are beginning to orchestrate these moments as a seamless, data-connected whole. CBRE’s move is a textbook example of that convergence playing out at scale.

The report maps this life cycle through a five-stage occupant journey, from the moment someone plans a visit to a building through to their departure and return, and uses this framework to benchmark how vendors and operators are performing at each stage. The findings span offices, hospitality environments and campus settings, reflecting the reality that pressure to deliver meaningful occupant experience is no longer confined to any single asset class. The logic extends well beyond traditional office environments into healthcare, industrial and education settings – a trajectory that aligns closely with what Verdantix is observing across the market.

The more significant story is structural. According to Verdantix research, the space and workplace management software market – which covers occupant-facing applications across offices and other commercial assets – is forecast to grow from $1.4 billion in 2024 to $2.4 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 9%, driven by firms prioritizing workplace experience (see Verdantix Market Size And Forecast: Real Estate & Built Environment Management Software (Real Estate Facilities & Workplace) 2024-2030 (Global)). Operators that consolidate fragmented experience delivery under a unified platform – combining front-of-house service, third-party partnerships and intelligent scheduling – are pulling ahead of those managing these elements in isolation. Our research provides insights into the platforms shaping this market across the full occupant journey, identifying where functionality is maturing and where meaningful gaps remain.

You can read the full analysis in the upcoming Verdantix report Market Insight: Innovation In User Experience – look out for it on Vantage.