Savills: Evaluating office scenarios by testing options in-house with laiout

The bottleneck was never judgement, it was translation. Lotte De Jong already knew, from conversations with leadership and the data her team collects on work patterns, roughly what a good office should contain: how many desks, how much collaboration space, what mix of focus and social areas made sense. Turning that judgement into an actual layout, however, meant handing it to an external architect and waiting for their availability, whether the office in question was Savills' own or a client's. That dependency became the immediate problem when Savills itself started weighing whether to expand its current office. Lotte needed a way to test scenarios directly: adjust headcount, reconfigure the floor, compare building options, without commissioning a new drawing every time the question changed. laiout matched that need. She could generate a layout from a floor plan, adjust it herself, and show leadership the result in the same conversation rather than the next one. The same fit carried over into her client-facing work. Occupier services depends on being able to answer a leadership team's "what if" in the room, not two weeks later, and a self-serve platform that didn't require a design background to operate meant that constraint went away for her clients too, not just for Savills' own real estate decisions.

Building a credible business case, for an occupier client or for Savills' own office, meant translating a leadership team's questions into a spatial answer: this headcount or that one, this building or that one, stay or move. Because design wasn't an in-house capability, every scenario had to be briefed to and drawn by an external architect, and every revision meant repeating that handoff. That made it hard to keep pace with a live conversation: leadership could raise a "what if" in a meeting, but the answer wouldn't arrive for days, by which point the discussion had often moved on, or an assumption about what was or wasn't physically possible in the space had gone unchallenged.

Savills relied on external architects for test-fit layouts, whether the client was an occupier weighing a move or Savills itself weighing its own office. Options arrived as static drawings after a design brief and a wait, and testing a different headcount, work pattern or building option meant a new round of markups and another wait for the revision, rather than something the leadership team could see change in front of them.

The clearest shift is in how fast a scenario can be tested and shown to a leadership team. laiout entered the picture while Savills was weighing whether to expand its own office, the same kind of stay-or-move decision Lotte's occupier services team helps clients make. What once required briefing an external architect and waiting on a redraw, she could now adjust herself, in the same meeting where the question was asked. "For me," she says, "it's really beneficial to have it in-house and do it myself." That self-serve ability has carried over into how she runs business cases for Savills' clients too. Rather than presenting a single option and returning days later with a revision, she can adjust headcount, work pattern or building options live and show the consequence immediately, which she says has let leadership teams stop talking in circles and settle assumptions about what is or isn't physically possible in a space, on the spot rather than in a follow-up email. Because that scenario testing no longer depends on an external architect's schedule, the same capability now supports both sides of Savills' real estate decisions, its own office and its clients'. Business cases move faster, and leadership and boards get to a decision with fewer rounds of back-and-forth and more confidence in what they're approving.

Lotte De Jong, Workplace Consultant, Savills "For me, it's really beneficial to have it in-house and do it myself."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHbUyD0W3ac&list=PLLbfTi0d-lsbMN4i3FAl6r5q00TX289LB&index=2&t=193s