Expert insight: When ‘secondary’ doesn’t tell the whole story

By Monika Newton, partner, Workman

It’s a common fairy tale trope: the beautiful façade concealing indifference, the plain exterior concealing warmth and care. Reality is rarely that neat but the pattern holds more often than the industry likes to admit.

I’ve seen new buildings with every amenity going, where occupiers still felt something was missing. A prime-plus asset with every box ticked at design stage, yet there’s no friendly greeting, no one fixing things before they had to chase. Having every amenity under the sun doesn’t guarantee the experience matches it.

And I’ve seen older buildings – no sky garden, no fancy app – where occupiers genuinely love being there and feel part of a community. The building team has time for them, fixes problems before they escalate and runs events that feel made for the people actually working there, rather than for a brochure.

On paper, one building is prime and one is secondary. In practice, occupiers know exactly which one they would rather be in; and it isn’t always the one with the better specification.

That’s the question worth putting to the wider industry: why do we still grade buildings almost entirely on what they look like, and barely at all on how they’re run every day? It’s time we started grading the experience, not just the asset.

Occupier experience is integral

Secondary stock isn’t the minority in this market. In fact, it makes up the lion’s share. BNP Paribas Real Estate’s data put Grade B at 75% of available Central London office stock, roughly 21m sq ft, against just 7m of Grade A. Meanwhile, the London Property Alliance found that 56.4% of all office floorspace in the city’s Central Activities Zone – 147.1m sq ft – is secondary. With little new office stock coming out of the ground, this is the bulk of what’s under management.

And yet the label tells us almost nothing about what it’s like to occupy the place. Grade A or B is a verdict on structure, amenity, specification and fit-out; everything that happens before a building becomes a workplace. It says nothing about how it is run once it’s occupied.

In my early career in hotels, no inspector ever rated a property on its space alone. They would check in, sleep in the bed, eat the breakfast and judge how they were looked after. In that world, customer experience is integral to the score.

Offices don’t work that way. A glossy, over-specified building can be run appallingly. A showy roof terrace that becomes a graveyard for plants the first scorching August. Visitors not greeted with a smile in reception. Meanwhile, a plain Grade-B block with a manager who knows the occupiers, resolves issues quickly and runs a tailored events calendar can feel like a genuinely prime place to work. Operationally, it is prime, whatever the particulars say.

How we grade offices needs to catch up

This isn’t merely anecdotal. Research by Sanderson and Devaney – which grew out of a Henley PhD part-funded by the British Property Federation and RealService – matched RealService longitudinal occupier satisfaction data against MSCI Investment Property Databank returns across 240 UK commercial properties over 12 years. Their model links a one-point rise in occupier satisfaction (on a 1–5 scale) to total returns nearly 5% higher, compounding over five years to roughly 2% annualised outperformance.

A newer US study by Hu, Kok and Palacios found a similar pattern from the occupier’s side: a one-point occupier satisfaction increase tracks with meaningfully higher renewal likelihood, an 11.5% higher likelihood to recommend the building and a 23% lower probability of moving out. Occupiers who are well looked after stay – and retention is value. Yet there’s no recognised grade for it.

The case, then, is for an operational grade sitting alongside the physical one – covering service responsiveness, day-to-day upkeep, community and communication, and whether feedback is acted on. Unlike the fabric of a building, this would need to be reassessed periodically because how a building is run can shift meaningfully year-to-year in a way its structure cannot.

Particulars reading “Grade-B building, Grade-A operation” would tell occupiers and investors something genuinely useful. It would give so-called “secondary” buildings – and the people running them – a way to be evaluated on what they deliver, not simply on what was specified a decade ago. We’ve acknowledged the huge shift in how offices are used – hybrid working, flexible leases, a focus on experience. The way we grade them hasn’t caught up.

No building should rest on the magic of a Grade-A rating. It needs someone who turns up and delivers the fundamentals of a brilliant occupier experience – and an industry willing to recognise that as part of the story.