How Density helped a top e-commerce company save $1M+ a year and increase office capacity by 18%

Challenge

Bringing teams back to the office is tricky. Try doing it across a 20-million-square-foot real estate portfolio, basically the size of Disneyland. That was the RTO puzzle a global e-commerce leader needed to solve.  

The company’s real estate team knew vast amounts of space were underutilized. But senior leaders insisted on keeping desk allocations high—that proverbial carrot to lure employees back on site. Everyone gets a desk (if they want one)!

But without real data on how individual teams were using their spaces, company occupancy planners lacked the evidence that real estate was being wasted. They couldn’t reallocate or reduce space without risking employee satisfaction.

This stalemate resulted in inefficiencies:

• Tens of millions of valuable square feet remained at least partially empty.
  
  
• Teams overestimated the number of desks needed based on perception, not data.
  
  
• Without accurate insights, opportunities to consolidate space and cut costs were missed.
  

Solution

The company decided to partner with Density to implement data-driven occupancy planning. Over a period of 9 months, they installed Density’s privacy-first, radar-based sensors across 700k sq ft of buildings. With this move, they were able to capture precise data on:

• Desk usage (by team, neighborhood and floor)
  
  
• Meeting room availability and saturation (or how many spaces are available during a given time interval)
  
  
• Space utilization patterns throughout the workday
  
  

Using this data, the occupancy planners finally had concrete insights on:

• Which desks were unused, even on the busiest days
  
  
• How meeting room usage correlated with floor busyness
  
  
• Where office capacity could increase without impacting employee experience
  
  

The findings were surprising. In one building the company was able to measure, employees often came in just for lunch—and bolted shortly afterwards. This discovery—that employees weren’t sticking around to use the office space—would have been missed if the company had continued relying on badge data alone. They’d have overestimated space usage and potentially taken on unnecessary and costly expansions. 

Counting on other data sources like WiFi/MAC address tracking or room bookings would have also painted an incomplete picture of how spaces were truly being used. Many companies try to make occupancy decisions using inadequate solutions. They may reveal how many people enter a building—but not which floors they visit or whether they actually use the spaces assigned to them. 

Key findings

• 26–45% of desks were unused on any given day.
  
  
• At least 18% additional employee capacity could be added to offices without running out of meeting rooms.
  
  
• On one floor, 106 more employees could be accommodated without putting a strain on existing meeting room capacity.
  
  

This clear, empirical evidence gave occupancy planners the leverage to confidently reassign desks to only the teams that really used them. They could consolidate office real estate and refute anecdotal claims from leaders that more space was the answer.

Impact

By reallocating space based on actual usage, the company:

• Avoided leasing or building out additional floors in key markets.
  
  
• Increased utilization in existing buildings, reducing overall footprint needs.
  
  
• Saved $1.02 million annually in OpEx costs for one building alone.
  
  

The investment in Density’s measurement for that building was $137,000 per year, delivering a 7.4x ROI. In other buildings, the ROI ranged between 8x–16x.

Why It Worked

• Precision: Radar-based sensors accurately measured space usage without capturing personal information (no cameras, no PII).
  
  
• Granularity: Space usage data was broken down by team, floor, and room type—enabling targeted changes.
  
  
• Decision confidence: Planners could counter space requests with objective data, shifting from anecdotal debates to fact-based conversations about whether space was actually needed.
  

• Cost avoidance: The company avoided expensive buildouts in high-cost markets ($400–$700 per sq. ft.) by maximizing existing capacity in a way that kept employees happy too.
  

Interested in learning more about how Density solutions can help your business?
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