5 Ways to Reduce Real Estate Expenses with Meeting Room Management Software

Looking to reduce real estate costs? Real estate is one of the largest recurring expenses for companies after personnel. The first steps in reducing real estate expenses are to track, measure, and analyze exactly how your current space is being used. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Meeting room management software is helpful to businesses that want to optimize space utilization and cut real estate expenses because it gives them an accurate picture of space utilization and enables them to determine whether they have too much space or the right kind of space. Below are 5 ways that meeting room management software can help you identify and take advantage of opportunities for real estate cost savings.

1. Use shared workspace

Hoteling and hot desking have taken off, and for good reason. Hoteling and hot desking are cost cutting measures that involve eliminating fixed desks and creating generic workstations for employees. Hoteling and hot desking are efficient and cost-effective alternatives to using traditional, assigned desks. With hoteling, employees must reserve unassigned workspaces, whereas with hot desking, employees select workspaces on a first-come, first-serve basis. Meeting room management software allows you to find and schedule shared workspaces with ease, so your organization can do away with dedicated workspaces and maximize office space.

2. Capture and analyze workspace utilization data

By keeping track of workspace utilization, you can determine when, how long, and how often workspaces are being used over time. Frequently, after some analysis, companies determine that their conference rooms and meeting spaces aren’t being used efficiently. For example, some of their meeting rooms may always be in high demand, while others sit empty. With meeting room management software, you can analyze meeting room and workspace usage to determine which resources are over- or underutilized. This could lead you to make the decision to repurpose some meeting rooms and turn them into office space or move to a smaller office.

3. Eliminate underutilized space’

Does your organization really need all of the real estate it occupies? According to research, up to 40% of your office space may be unused at any given moment. Determine exactly which spaces are used and which aren’t by tracking resource utilization with meeting room management software. Eliminate any underutilized space that isn’t needed. This alone can be a significant source of cost savings that flows directly to your bottom line.

4. Use meeting rooms and workspaces more efficiently

Meeting room management software ensures optimal usage of office spaces

When you understand how your rooms and resources are being used, you can start to identify trends and then alter your behavior in order to use your space more efficiently. There’s a big difference between planned usage and actual usage. For example, let’s say that the number of attendees for a meeting is uncertain and a large meeting room is booked for the meeting just in case. Ultimately, the large meeting room is used inefficiently because only a few people end up attending and they easily could have fit into a smaller space. It’s important to use comprehensive meeting room software that also manages attendees to ensure that the proper amount of catering and other services are ordered for each meeting and that nothing goes to waste.

Another example of inefficiency is a company that provides dedicated workspaces to employees who are frequently on the road. By tracking resource utilization with meeting room management software, the company would determine that eliminating dedicated workspaces and replacing them with shared workspaces would be a more cost-effective solution.

Meeting room software that integrates with interactive digital meeting room signs can also help you use meeting space more efficiently. Digital meeting room signs display up-to-date information right outside of meeting rooms, allowing users to end the meeting directly on the digital sign if the meeting finishes early. The meeting room is automatically displayed as available both on the meeting room sign and in Outlook®. This frees up the meeting room for others to use, thus optimizing meeting room usage.

5. Reduce energy costs

Energy is costly and will become more so in the coming years. By monitoring occupancy and utilization data with meeting room management software, you can determine exactly which spaces are occupied or unoccupied and ensure that lighting and heating/cooling are switched off when the spaces aren’t in use.

Analyze Resource Utilization Data and Lower Real Estate Costs with Resource Central

Resource Central is complete meeting room management software for Microsoft Outlook® that allows users to easily find and book available meeting rooms and workspaces, invite meeting attendees, and order additional services, such as catering. Resource Central also handles changes and cancellations automatically, which saves users time and frees them up for other tasks.

Resource Central passively records resource utilization data and generates reports that allow you to monitor meeting room and workspace usage, so you can use your workspace more efficiently, eliminate unnecessary space, lower energy costs, and boost your bottom line. To learn more about Resource Central and how it can help you save time and reduce real estate overhead, please contact us for an online demo or a trial version of our software.