If you are a corporate space planner, figuring out how to right-size your office space can seem overwhelming. How can you create a new stacking plan that takes advantage of your existing vacancy? You may need room for a new team or just want to consolidate so you can sublease space that’s not needed.

Just figuring out where you have empty seats can take weeks all by itself. And while you are collecting that data, it’s already becoming outdated as people move around. The good news is, there’s a much easier way to create a new stacking plan that consolidates your vacant seats. Watch this video to see Serraview’s Ian Morley demonstrate how to do it in a couple of minutes.

And don’t forget, if you’ve got questions, send us a message on Twitter and use the hashtag #AskSerraview.

Hello, and welcome to Serraview’s first Space Planning Video Blog!

My name is Ian Morley, and I’m here to answer your most pressing questions about corporate space management.To get the ball rolling, let’s start with one of the most commonly asked questions we get from clients.

The question is: What is the best way to right-size my office space?It’s a great question. Let me show you how we can use our Scenario Planning Tools to quickly answer it.First up, I’m going to open up Serraview’s Block & Stack tool and take a look at the extent of the problem.

We’re going to take a look at the stacking plan for our building at 100 Broadway.

Here you can see our current stacking plan for the building, including how many seats are assigned to each business unit.

If you look here at the top right, you can see some key metrics about the building.

The key number I’m looking for is this one here in gray… it’s showing that we currently have 429 vacant seats in the building.

If you look at the floors you can see that they average about 128 seats per floor. In other words, if we create a new stacking plan to right-size the space allocations, we should be able to free up over 3 floors of space.

Putting that into perspective, in most major cities, that’s the equivalent of over $3 million in wasted real estate space.

Ok, so how do we go about creating a new stacking plan to right-size the building?

The best way to do that is to create a what-if scenario plan.

We’ll go to the FILE menu and choose NEW PROJECT.

I’ll add a PROJECT NAME and enter my building.

To right-size my team allocations, I select all the teams, then choose TOOLS, Set to occupants.

You can see that the system has now compressed all of the teams’ allocations, and freed up all this vacancy here in the white.

Now, we may be able to stop here, but I do want to go a step further and quickly restack the building by dragging and dropping our groups around. That way, we can consolidate all our available space into a couple of floors, so that we can hopefully sublet or repurpose for another project team that’s about to enter the building.

An there we have it! In the space of a couple of minutes, we’ve just created a new stacking plan to right-sized the building, and we’ve freed up over three floors of vacant space.

Thank you for joining us for Serraview’s first Space Planning Video Blog!

If you have a pressing question that you’d like us to answer, please send us a message over Twitter, using the hashtag #AskSerraview.

I look forward to it, and see you next time.

To learn more about corporate space planning issues, read these related topics:

Fast-Track Corporate Space Planning: Technology Can Shorten Your Day
10 Steps That Drive Better Space Efficiency in the Workplace

If you’re just beginning a search for the right corporate space planning tool, you’ll quickly discover that comparing the available options is no easy task. There’s a wide range of features and functionality, and it can be tricky to figure out what will deliver the results you’re after. Hone in on the search criteria that help companies get faster results and better ROI with this helpful guide to 5 Critical Comparison Points for Workplace Management Software.