The empty-room problem universities can no longer afford to ignore
James Cobb, CEO and Founder, Crowd Connected
The most expensive room on campus is not necessarily the newest lecture theatre, the most highly specified lab or the library space with the best view. It may simply be the room nobody is using.
That sounds flippant, but it is becoming a very serious estates problem. Universities are under pressure from every direction. The Office for Students has warned that providers remain under continued financial pressure from volatile student recruitment and rising costs, with more than a third of institutions reporting a deficit in 2024-25 and the proportion forecast to rise in 2025-26.
Costs are up. Student expectations are up. Carbon targets are not getting any easier. At the same time, many institutions are being asked to make difficult decisions about buildings, opening hours, maintenance, consolidation and capital spending.
The temptation, understandably, is to look at the estate as a spreadsheet. How many buildings do we have? What does each cost to run? Which ones can we close, shrink, sublet, mothball or repurpose?
But campus life does not happen in a spreadsheet. It happens in messy, human, unpredictable ways. Students go where they feel comfortable. They avoid spaces that are hard to find. They abandon rooms that are too big, too small, too hot, too hidden, or simply not where their day naturally takes them. Staff book space with one set of assumptions and then reality intervenes.
The problem is that many universities still make major estates decisions using data that describes the plan, not the reality. A timetable tells you what should happen. A room booking tells you what somebody intended to happen. Neither tells you whether anyone turned up.
That distinction matters. Booked is not the same as used. Used is not the same as full. Empty is not always wasted. Busy is not always efficient. Those differences are now too expensive to ignore.
In recent multi-campus occupancy data gathered by Crowd Connected across 186 rooms, rooms were in active use for 40 per cent of operating hours. In other words, in a typical operating hour, six in ten rooms were empty.
Even when rooms were being used, they were often far bigger than the group required. Across the same data set, average capacity when occupied was 36 per cent, meaning occupied rooms were still roughly two-thirds empty. The data also found an 18 per cent timetable no-show rate, with 106 of 605 evaluable timetabled events recording no attendance at all.
Those figures illustrate a wider point every estates and facilities team will recognise: the gap between planned use and actual use can be enormous.
Some rooms are booked and unused. Some are used and under-filled. Some are used with no booking at all. Some may appear quiet on a timetable but be vital to the informal student experience. Some may look inefficient in isolation but be essential because of accessibility, specialist equipment, location, or the way students move between buildings.
That is why crude cuts can be dangerous. Closing a building, reducing opening hours or forcing more activity into fewer spaces may save money on paper. But without reliable usage data, it can also move pressure somewhere else. A study space closes and the library overheats. A teaching room is withdrawn and students end up walking further across campus between sessions. A quiet area turns out to be the place commuter students use between classes. A building that looks under-used in week three becomes essential in week ten.
Estate rationalisation is not wrong. In many cases it is unavoidable. But it needs evidence. That makes the start of the academic year important, not because Freshers’ Week solves the problem, but because it is when the evidence picture starts being built.
Once September arrives, every week without measurement is a week missing from the picture. The same week will not come round again for another 12 months. New students arrive. Timetables go live. Buildings are tested. Support services come under pressure. Informal patterns of campus life begin to form.
If universities want to understand how their estate really behaves across the year, measurement needs to be in place from day one, not reconstructed later from partial evidence.
This is where estates teams need to move from snapshot to signal.
Traditional utilisation studies have value, but they are usually periodic. Someone walks the building with a clipboard, records what is happening, and produces a report. That can be useful, especially as a starting point, but it is still a sample. It tells you what was happening at that moment, in that week, under those conditions.
Continuous occupancy data changes the conversation. Not so long ago, that was unrealistic. Measurement was either impossible or too expensive and complex to deploy at scale. That has changed. Over the last decade, hardware and software have improved to the point where measurement has moved from technically feasible to operationally straightforward.
That matters because it lets universities see patterns across days, weeks and terms. It makes the invisible visible… the no-shows, the half-empty rooms, the unbooked activity, the pinch points, the dead zones and the spaces students actually value.
It also helps join up questions that are too often treated separately. Space utilisation is not just an estates efficiency issue. It affects timetabling, student experience, accessibility, wellbeing, sustainability, security, cleaning, energy use and capital planning. The same room can be a cost problem, a carbon problem and a student experience problem at the same time.
That is why the answer is not simply use less space. The better question is… use which space, when, for whom, and why?
There are five practical steps universities can take now to help plan and overcome the empty room problem:
- Put measurement in place before the first day of term. The earlier data collection starts, the fewer blind spots the university creates for itself. Historic use, timetables, anecdotal feedback and one-off surveys all have value, but they should not be the only evidence base for decisions that affect cost, carbon and student experience.
- Measure use, not just bookings. A booked room is not always a used room, and a used room may still be far below capacity. Frequency and fill rate both matter.
- Treat the first term as a live evidence-gathering period. Watch where students actually go, where they struggle, where demand clusters, and where capacity sits unused.
- Connect space data to student experience. A room is not just a room. Its location, accessibility, atmosphere and proximity to other parts of the student day all affect whether it works.
- Make cuts only with evidence. Before closing buildings, reducing opening hours or changing room allocations, understand the likely impact on behaviour, demand and experience.
A clear evidence base is essential. The estate is no longer a background operational issue. It is now central to financial resilience, carbon reduction and the student experience.
Instead of asking “What space do we have, and how is it booked?”, the better question is: “What is really happening here?”.
Once you can answer that, the decisions become clearer. Not always easier, but clearer. And in the current climate, clarity is worth a lot.
Biography
James Cobb is CEO and Founder of Crowd Connected, a British location intelligence company that helps organisations understand how people, assets and spaces behave in the real world. Founded in 2013 and based in Guildford, Crowd Connected works with universities, venues and major event organisers in more than 30 countries, turning real-world behavioural data into practical insight for better space planning, operations, visitor experience and estate strategy.