The Presence Dividend

India has already answered the two questions the world spent five years debating: will offices fill, and will people return? Gross leasing hit a record 83.3 million sq ft in 2025, vacancy is at a five-year low of 14.5%, and nine in ten employers ask for three or more days a week in the office.

Then there is the other half of the picture. People come in 3.2 days a week when they are asked for 3.8. More than half report moderate to high burnout, the highest rate in Asia Pacific, and two in five say they may leave within a year.

Both describe the same workforce. The value sitting in that gap is the Presence Dividend. Attendance is compliance. Presence is a choice. Employers can require the first; only the building, and the way it is run, can earn the second.

The rest of the world has not solved this either. The 2026 global headline was that the gap between actual and target office utilization had narrowed, but most of that narrowing came from the target being cut rather than from utilization rising. India will fill more new space, faster, than most markets, so the cost of getting this wrong lands here first, and India will have to write that playbook rather than wait for one. That playbook has three parts: the brief, daily operations and what leadership counts.

Every building sets a limit on how well the people inside it can think and work, fixed by its air, light, acoustics and ability to adapt. India’s premium buildings have never been better specified, but specifying is not delivering: these factors get ticked at certification, then rarely commissioned and never measured once the building fills.

Asked which investments would most improve employee productivity, half of India’s C-suite and CRE leaders named advanced technology and AI support. Cognitive performance was named by 24%, wellbeing amenities by 21% and biophilic design by 13%. India is funding the digital workplace and underfunding the physical one, and people notice: just over half of office time goes on focused work, yet only 16% say the office is the best place for it, against 54% who say home.

Most of the workplace of 2035 has already been built. Around three-fifths of India’s Grade A stock, more than 550 million sq ft, needs upgrading to meet future occupier and sustainability standards, with a 15% to 30% rental premium achievable after retrofit. Treated as compliance it looks like a bill. Treated as repositioning it is one of the largest value-add opportunities in Indian real estate. India can afford it either way: fit-out costs here run 46% below the Asia Pacific benchmark, so the capital that buys a baseline office elsewhere buys air, light and acoustic engineering here.

India’s occupiers have already chosen. Asked what will take priority in future investment decisions, they picked hospitality-grade service over traditional facilities management by 66% to 34%. They are buying service rather than savings.

Among employees who like their workplace, 85% feel positive about their attendance policy; among those who do not, 58% feel negative. India’s three weakest workplace factors are sound privacy, catering and vending, and acoustics, and almost none of that waits on a capital cycle.

The building’s own performance is the same story. A ten-year-old Bengaluru twin-tower office cut energy use by 12.4% and saved INR 19.7 million over 31 months purely by re-tuning what was already installed, with no capital spend at all. Fuller offices and net-zero targets look like opposing forces only because of how energy is measured. Per square foot a full building looks like a failure; divide instead by the hours people are actually in it and the conflict goes away. None of it runs itself, though. For the first time in fifteen years of JLL’s global real estate technology survey, skills gaps outrank budget constraints as the main barrier to value creation in India. Money is no longer the constraint. Capability is.

Companies budget for what they count. Of the Asia Pacific organizations that track attendance at all, 77% do it by badge swipe, and presence-based sensing fell from 19% to 7% in a single year. The industry is measuring that a person walked in and measuring it less well than last year. Four swaps change the denominator from space to the people present: cost per turn-up instead of cost per full-time employee, experience per square foot instead of cost per square foot, engaged presence instead of badge-swipe attendance, and energy per occupied hour instead of energy per square foot.

^{Source: JLL Research}

The cost of skipping measurement shows up in the technology numbers. Of the 91% of Indian occupiers piloting or planning AI in real estate, only 5% achieve most of what they set out to do. The small group that succeeds does three things first. It audits what it already has, sets the success metric before buying, and puts real estate, HR, IT and finance around one table. All three are free, and all three are measurement disciplines.

None of this waits on a lease event, a capital cycle or a board mandate. Put the presence specification into the next brief, written as engineering requirements with target numbers and commissioned against. Instrument one building, with sensing connected to the work-order system so the loop closes; re-tuning alone returns 3% to 27% of energy, which is what funds it. Then change one number, replacing energy per square foot with energy per occupied hour, and segment attrition by the quality of the workplace people sit in. Almost nobody measures that today, which is why nobody can yet tell you the answer.

For investors and owners, underwrite one retrofit on presence rather than carbon, modelling the return on occupancy, rent and asset value rather than energy alone. The evidence exists; what is usually missing is one worked example inside your own portfolio. And the window is closing, with fit-out costs rising 2% to 5% a year locally and the occupiers who will set the 2035 specification signing leases now.

India already has the space, and it already has the attendance. The dividend is the distance between them, collected by specification, by operation and by measurement, in that order. None of it needs a decade, and in time the market prices the result: presence in rent and valuation, and a building falling behind on experience recognized as an asset risk.

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