Why SHB has a technology team and how it helps businesses
You wouldn’t expect an independent commercial property firm to employ a Director of Technology. SHB had the vision for data in occupier advisory early and has been building out the function for the last six years.
Josh Pattison took on the role after he was connected to SHB’s CEO, Simon Blair, to build a data function from scratch. The brief was simple to state and hard to deliver: help occupiers make property decisions based on evidence rather than instinct. Six years on, that work has shaped how SHB advises clients, and it has surfaced some hard truths about the data gaps still holding the industry back.
Advantage of building your own tech
The decision to build rather than buy came down to two things: ownership of the intellectual property and the ability to move fast. Relying on third-party platforms meant relying on someone else’s roadmap. When SHB needed to adapt quickly for a client, that dependency became a genuine constraint.
Owning the technology in-house solved that. Early on, the team leaned on external platforms and partners to get off the ground before building out proprietary capability. That’s a trade-off worth naming for any firm weighing the same decision: agility later usually means slower progress at the start.
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What the data is actually for
SHB’s platforms exist to answer a question that used to be settled by instinct: where should this business be based, and why? Historically, office location decisions were often driven by one person’s commute. The shift SHB has pushed for is toward a decision built on evidence, pulled together through LOC8, which handles market search and availability and BYTE, which supplies the underlying market data.
Together they bring in:
• Market rent data set against budget
• Location analysis covering travel times and commute costs
• Availability across the relevant submarkets
• ESG credentials, where the building can support them
That last point remains the hardest to deliver consistently. Access to sustainability data is patchy, and the number of buildings with genuinely usable ESG capability is still small. SHB is seeing more requests for it, particularly from larger occupiers where sustainability is at the core of the business, but the process of gathering it remains largely manual.
The AI question clients are now asking
Client expectations have moved. Some now ask, reasonably, why they’d pay for advice they could get by putting the same questions to an AI model themselves.
The honest answer is that the analysis is only part of the job. Running a location comparison is something a client could do unassisted. Negotiating with landlords, interpreting what the analysis actually means for a specific business, and applying years of market experience to the result is a different skill, and it’s the part that still requires a person. SHB’s approach has been to pair the tools with the surveyor rather than position one as a replacement for the other. Once clients see that pairing in action, the “I’ll just do it myself” conversation tends to resolve itself.
The data gap that matters most: what happens after move-in
The most consistent finding from six years of client work is not about finding new office space. It’s about what happens once a business has moved in.
This is where TERA, SHB’s client-facing portfolio management platform, is designed to close the gap.
Occupiers are commonly missing
A single source of truth for lease data
Break dates, rent reviews, and lease terms often sit in different systems or in someone’s inbox, rather than in one place anyone can check.
Occupancy data
Very few businesses can say with confidence how many people are actually using the space they’re paying for on a given day, or where the peaks and troughs fall.
Energy and operational cost visibility
Utility data is often provided manually and rarely connects to a broader view of how efficiently a building is being run.
TERA brings lease, occupancy and operating data into one place, and gives clients a live view rather than a document trail assembled after the fact.
We have seen occupiers miss break notices worth close to half a million pounds because of something as simple as a date format mismatch between UK and US conventions. The fix isn’t complicated. It’s having one place where that information lives, and a process that flags key dates before they’re missed.
Why this doesn’t sit with landlords alone
There’s an instinct to put the responsibility for better data on building owners. SHB’s view, shaped by direct conversations with clients, is that real change has to be driven by occupiers themselves. Landlords will invest in better data capabilities once enough tenants ask for them. Right now, that demand is still coming from a minority of businesses, not the majority.
That puts advisors in an important position. Most occupiers are still guided by their agents, and most don’t yet know what questions to ask about a building’s data capability, let alone what a good answer looks like. Closing that gap is as much an education exercise as a technology one, and it’s a theme that comes up repeatedly in SHB’s work: businesses can’t ask for what they don’t know exists.
What comes next
SHB’s near-term roadmap is less about a step change and more about consolidation: connecting to more building systems where they exist, giving clients more direct access to their own data, and continuing to push for the kind of building-level benchmarking that would let occupiers compare like for like. A standardised way to assess a building’s technology, sustainability credentials and occupancy capability would give clients a genuine framework rather than a patchwork of assumptions, and it’s a gap SHB is actively working to close.
The underlying message holds regardless of where the roadmap lands. Better property decisions start with better data, and better data starts with someone in the business asking for it.
