PropertyNL recently published an article on a question that RE-SEARCH hears with growing frequency from tenants, landlords and investors alike: "But how digital is this building, exactly?" The piece, titled Re-Search komt met IT-Label voor digitaal opleverniveau vastgoed, covers the initiative that RE-SEARCH has developed together with IT-Label to give that question a concrete, comparable answer. For us, however, the publication is not the story. The story is the gap it reveals: commercial real estate is measured, described and compared in extraordinary detail, yet the digital quality of a building remains almost entirely invisible. That needs to change.
Commercial Real Estate Has a Digital Blind Spot
When a prospective tenant evaluates a building today, the data available is impressively detailed. Floor area to the nearest square metre. Rent per square metre per year. Number of parking spaces. Energy label. BREEAM or WELL certification. Floor-to-ceiling height. Loading dock specifications. This information is expected, standardised and, on a platform like RE-SEARCH, immediately accessible whether you are looking at office space for rent in Amsterdam or warehouse and logistics space in Rotterdam.
And yet, for most buildings, you cannot find out:
- What internet connectivity is present and who provides it
- Whether there is redundant connectivity in case the primary connection fails
- What the actual digital delivery level is at handover
- Which smart building systems are installed or prepared
- How easily the digital infrastructure can be scaled up
- What investment a new tenant must make before the space is digitally functional
This is the digital blind spot of the real estate market. We know how many square metres a building has. We know far too little about what those square metres can handle digitally. That asymmetry is no longer a minor inconvenience. For a growing share of organisations, it is a genuine obstacle to making informed location decisions.
IT Was Long Treated as Someone Else's Problem
The reason digital infrastructure has remained invisible for so long is not difficult to understand. For decades, IT was considered a matter for the IT department. When a company moved into new commercial space, the lease covered the building shell. Digital connectivity was arranged separately, after the fact, by whichever team handled technology procurement. The building itself was neutral on the subject.
That separation made sense in an era when a building's digital role was limited to a few telephone lines and a server room in the basement. It makes far less sense today. Modern organisations run entirely on digital infrastructure. Cloud platforms, video conferencing, AI-powered tools, sensor networks, access control systems, building management systems: all of these depend on the quality of the digital layer inside and connecting to the building. If that layer is inadequate, the building is functionally inadequate, regardless of how appealing its physical characteristics might be.
Digital infrastructure is now part of how a building is used, how it is leased, how it is managed, how it is developed and, increasingly, how it is valued. It deserves a place alongside the physical and energetic characteristics of a property, not as a footnote, but as a standard data point. For more on how buildings are being evaluated through this lens, the article Digital Real Estate: What Can a Building Handle Digitally? provides a solid starting point.
The Tenant's Question Has Changed
A few years ago, the central question in a commercial property search was straightforward: how many square metres do we need, where, and at what cost? Those questions remain important. But alongside them, a different set of questions has entered the conversation, and they are asked earlier in the process than before.
Can we work reliably here? Is the connection stable enough for video calls with thirty people simultaneously? Can we connect our AI tools without performance issues? Is the building ready for IoT sensors? Can we expand our network if the team grows? Will the building's infrastructure support us in three years, not just today?
These are not purely technical questions. They are real estate questions. They affect which building a tenant chooses, how quickly a space can be occupied productively, and what the true total cost of a lease looks like once digital investment requirements are factored in. As explored in the article Your Lease Lasts 5 Years. How Will You Work in 3?, the gap between signing a lease and actually knowing what the building can support is a risk that tenants bear disproportionately.
Why RE-SEARCH Supports IT-Label
RE-SEARCH exists to make commercial real estate decisions better informed. That means collecting data, structuring it, making it comparable and presenting it in a way that helps tenants, landlords, investors and advisors make decisions with confidence. When we looked at digital infrastructure, we found a category of information that was both critically important and almost entirely absent from standard property data.
IT-Label is the initiative that addresses that gap. It provides a framework for assessing and communicating the digital delivery level of a building: what is present, what is delivered at handover, what the building can support and how future-proof the infrastructure is. The goal is not to impose a rigid technical standard. The goal is to create a shared language, one that allows a property professional who has never configured a network switch to understand exactly what a building offers digitally and what it does not.
This connects directly to RE-SEARCH's partnership with IT-Label, described in more detail in RE-SEARCH Becomes Official Knowledge Partner of IT-Label. The ambition is straightforward: digital infrastructure quality should be as readable and comparable as an energy label.
From Technical Data to Real Estate Language
One of the practical challenges in making digital infrastructure visible is that the information currently available is almost always written in technical language. Terms like redundant connectivity, patch room capacity, OT networks, fibre termination points and IoT readiness are precise and useful, but they are not immediately meaningful to a real estate professional trying to advise a client.
The translation layer matters enormously. Consider two examples:
Technical: "Redundant upstream connectivity via two independent providers."
Real estate language: "The building has a backup internet connection that activates automatically if the primary connection fails. Downtime risk is minimal."
Technical: "IoT-ready infrastructure with structured cabling to every floor."
Real estate language: "The building is prepared for smart sensors, environmental monitoring and automated systems. No major additional cabling investment is required."
Data has value only when the person reading it understands what it means. RE-SEARCH works with building data every day, and the same principle applies whether the data point is square metres, parking ratios or digital infrastructure capacity. The framework developed through IT-Label is designed to make that translation systematic and consistent across the market. You can read more about the underlying infrastructure questions in IT Infrastructure in Commercial Real Estate: The New Scarcity Factor.
RE-SEARCH Stands for Research and for Sharing Knowledge
The name RE-SEARCH is not accidental. It reflects a belief that better real estate decisions come from better research: asking more precise questions, collecting more relevant data, recognising patterns and making that knowledge available to the market. That is what the platform does with location data, building specifications, market intelligence and now, increasingly, digital infrastructure quality.
But RE-SEARCH also recognises that the digitisation of real estate is too large and too complex for any single organisation to address alone. The digital layer of a building sits at the intersection of real estate, IT, telecommunications, cybersecurity, smart building technology, IoT, installation engineering and sustainability. No single discipline owns all of that knowledge.
That is why the vision behind IT-Label is not proprietary. It is a knowledge-sharing initiative. The ambition is to bring together professionals from across those disciplines to build a common understanding of what digital building quality means, how it should be measured and how it should be communicated. We do not believe one party has all the answers. We believe that by sharing knowledge, the market can move further, faster.
The Digital Passport of Commercial Property
The analogy with energy labelling is instructive. A generation ago, the energy performance of a building was technical information that most real estate professionals could not readily interpret. The introduction of standardised energy labels changed that. Today, an energy label is a normal part of the property data set. It is referenced in listings, discussed in negotiations and factored into investment decisions. Commercial properties in major cities such as Utrecht and The Hague now face regulatory requirements tied to minimum energy label standards, which shows how quickly a new data layer can move from optional context to essential criterion.
RE-SEARCH sees the same trajectory for digital infrastructure. Not as a replacement for energy performance data, but as a parallel quality dimension. The question "what can this building handle digitally?" deserves to sit alongside questions about location, area and energy performance as a standard part of property evaluation.
In practical terms, this points toward what could be called a digital passport for commercial property: a structured record of what digital infrastructure is present, what is delivered at handover, what the building can support in its current state and what it can grow into. IT-Label is designed to make that passport possible.
The Entire Real Estate Chain Needs to Participate
For digital infrastructure data to become genuinely useful in the market, multiple parties need to engage with it simultaneously. The tenant needs to know what they are receiving at handover. The landlord needs to be able to describe what they are offering. The advisor or broker needs to include digital capability in the brief and the search. The investor needs to be able to assess digital quality as part of asset evaluation. The developer needs to understand where the market is heading before committing to infrastructure choices.
And the IT professional needs to communicate technical information in terms that the rest of the chain can act on. IT-Label creates a framework for exactly this kind of cross-disciplinary conversation. It is an open invitation to anyone with relevant knowledge, whether from real estate, technology, telecommunications, cybersecurity or building management, to contribute to building a shared standard.
The PropertyNL Feature Is a Starting Point, Not a Destination
That PropertyNL chose to cover the IT-Label initiative signals that the question of digital building quality is gaining traction in the mainstream real estate conversation. That is encouraging. But a publication is a beginning, not a conclusion. Before the market can compare, it first needs to know that comparison is possible. Awareness is the prerequisite for action.
The real estate market has spent decades refining its ability to describe and compare the physical and energetic qualities of buildings. The next refinement is the digital layer. Not as a technical add-on, but as a core property characteristic that affects usability, investment value and long-term relevance.
You can read the full PropertyNL article here: Re-Search komt met IT-Label voor digitaal opleverniveau vastgoed. It covers the initiative in detail and explains why digital delivery level is becoming an increasingly important component of how commercial property is described and assessed.
Make Visible What Is Still Invisible
The real estate market has long focused on what is visible: bricks, metres, location, energy. The next step is to focus on what is less visible: data, connectivity, digital infrastructure and the actual capabilities of a building. A building can look entirely modern from the outside. The real question is what it can do digitally.
RE-SEARCH stands for research. For looking further. For sharing knowledge. And for connecting data to better real estate decisions. IT-Label is the next step in that direction, not as an endpoint, but as the beginning of a broader shift in how the real estate market understands and communicates building quality.
We invite the entire market to investigate alongside us, to contribute knowledge and to help make digital real estate quality as readable, comparable and expected as any other property characteristic. The digital future of real estate is something we build together.
Make visible what is still invisible.
