Share with your CHRO
For the first time in 15 years of JLL’s tracking, skills gaps have overtaken budget as the primary barrier to corporate real estate transformation, according to JLL’s Future of Work Survey 2026. The deficit is concentrated in AI, analytics, and change management, the exact capabilities organizations need to reconfigure their portfolios quickly and demonstrate real estate’s impact on productivity and resilience. C-suites are asking CRE to prove business value on dimensions that most teams currently lack the tools or talent to measure.
What this means for your business
The capability gap JLL surfaces isn’t a real estate problem wearing a skills label. It’s a workforce planning problem that lands squarely on the CHRO’s desk. If your CRE team can’t hire or develop AI and analytics talent, and can’t deploy change management rigor around AI-driven workplace shifts, the organization loses its ability to reconfigure space at the speed the business now requires. CHROs who treat this as facilities’ problem to solve will find themselves accountable for a productivity drag they never owned the budget to fix.
The measurement trap buried in this data deserves direct attention. CRE teams can track energy consumption and cost per square foot with precision, but the C-suite increasingly wants proof that workspace decisions drive innovation output and organizational resilience. Those are longitudinal, survey-intensive, model-heavy measurements, and JLL, whose advisory business benefits from clients that can’t build these models in-house, is accurate that most organizations lack the capability today. The implication is that the skills gap compounds itself: without analytical talent, CRE can’t demonstrate value, and without demonstrated value, it can’t attract or justify analytical talent.
The organization that wins this next phase builds a shared analytics function across CRE and HR before the budget cycle forces a false choice between the two. If your workforce planning and real estate planning teams are still reporting into separate towers with no shared data layer, the portfolio will keep lagging the headcount by six to eighteen months. The leading indicator to watch is whether your next real estate vendor contract includes workforce analytics integration as a deliverable, not an optional add-on.
Based on reporting from The future of work survey 2026, originally published 2026-07-14 03:00:00.
