Ten percent of buildings carry roughly 60% of national office vacancy in today’s market. 

This statistic should change how owners read every market report, said Steve Dietz, managing director of real estate experience platform HqO. Rather than recovering in one direction, the office market is sorting into tenant-centric winners and obsolete losers, often in the same metro, with the differentiator being its amenity programming and operations, he said.

HqO helps owners close what it refers to as the “experience gap” and grow tenant lifetime value across more than 1B SF, 1,500-plus properties and over 32 countries.

“The landlords who win the next decade will measure tenant relationships as rigorously as they measure rent rolls,” Dietz said.

Asset owners often ask for a prescriptive amenity list they can capitalize on, but their customers — the tenants and the people showing up — are saying it is not enough to provide the space: They have to provide a holistic experience and prove it is working, he said.

Dietz will discuss how owners can take a hospitality-focused, measurement-driven approach to their portfolios at Bisnow’s Los Angeles Office and Workplace Summit on Sept. 15. The event will bring together office stakeholders to discuss the direction of LA’s office market, how owners can approach their portfolios, the long-term benefits of prioritizing the tenant experience and more. Click here to register and purchase tickets.

Dietz spoke with Bisnow about how owners should think about amenities and operations, how tenant health data turns experience from a soft story into an operating discipline, and what LA’s bifurcated submarkets make visible for the rest of the country.

Bisnow: How should office owners be approaching their spaces?

Dietz: Stop starting with the amenity list. The buildings that win are the ones whose layout, programming and day-to-day operations match how people actually work in 2026: collaborative, intermittent and event-heavy.

Take an event space. As a physical amenity, it looks great on a tour. Sitting empty, it is a liability. Programming it, promoting it and measuring whether people show up turns it into healthy, organic activity in the building. The same is true for amenity booking, mobile access, and visitor and lobby flow. Experience is an operating model, not a capital project you finish once.

Historically, commercial real estate has underinvested in measuring customer satisfaction. That is changing fast because satisfaction is becoming predictive of renewals, rents and returns. A mandate can get bodies in the building. A good experience is what keeps them there. Attendance is earned now, not assumed.

Bisnow: How does HqO’s Real Estate Experience platform help landlords with operations and meeting tenants’ needs?

Dietz: HqO is the operating system landlords use to close the experience gap across a whole portfolio, which is the distance between what tenants expect and what buildings actually deliver. Most portfolios still sit in that gap. Our job is to make the tenant relationship measurable, then help operators act on it.

The core measure is the tenant health score:

• usage: if they come to the office and book an event;

• engagement: if they attend the events, invite visitors or use the building as a community;

• and sentiment: what they say in surveys about what is working and what is missing. 

Landlords have spent decades measuring whether a tenant can pay. Tenant health tells you whether they will stay. Credit is a lagging indicator. Tenant health is a leading one.

That means unifying the 10 to 15 disconnected systems most buildings run — access, booking, work orders and surveys — into one operating layer. A signal like utilization down 40% in 30 days becomes a playbook, not just another dashboard. The outcome we care about is tenant lifetime value: retention, expansion and relationship value across buildings, not just one lease.

The operators who already treat experience as a system are compounding an advantage that is hard to copy. You see it in portfolios that have driven Leesman+ certification performance building by building, and in large occupiers that now tie workplace experience scores to executive accountability and keep-or-exit decisions. The pattern is the same: Measure the relationship, then run the building accordingly.

Bisnow: What do you think will be the hottest topics of discussion at the LA Office and Workplace Summit?

Dietz: Everything will orbit bifurcation. Which side of the line is each asset on? In LA, entertainment-linked demand has been under stress, while AI and advanced services are a real growth engine for Southern California. Century City is performing terrifically, while downtown has more choppiness. The mayoral race will raise the “is LA investable?” question. Our answer is yes — but not uniformly. You have to underwrite submarket by submarket and product by product.

You can almost see both markets from the same rooftop: the buildings that earn the commute, and the ones that don’t. AI is the office market’s biggest long-term question. “Return to office” as a slogan is dead. The owners who win will amenitize and operate so tenants still value the product whether they come in three days a week or five.

Bisnow: What do you want people to take away from your remarks at the event?

Dietz: The sorting is largely done. The interesting question is what the winners do next. Across a portfolio, you can own assets in softer submarkets and still outperform if you run a programmatic experience model. A terrific operational experience travels to any submarket. Hospitality-minded operations work in Century City, and they work in tougher urban nodes as well, because people still decide every morning whether the commute is worth it.

The next decade of CRE belongs to landlords who measure relationships as rigorously as they measure rent rolls. LA is a live case study of that dividing line. We are going to talk about the techniques that are working for the operators who have already crossed it.

Click here to learn more about Bisnow’s LA Office and Workplace Summit

This article was produced in collaboration between HqO and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.