What data does office-change intelligence use?
Almost every office decision leaves a paper trail in the public record months before anyone announces anything. Office-change intelligence reads that trail continuously, across several independent registers, and joins it at the level of a named company in a specific building.
- Registered leases — start dates, terms, expiries and breaks (HM Land Registry).
- Company filings — accounts, officers, ownership changes, funding, registered addresses (Companies House).
- Planning applications — especially works filed on occupied office buildings (local-authority portals).
- Business-rates and floor-area records — who occupies what, and how much of it (VOA, borough billing data).
- Building performance — EPC ratings, which drive minimum-standard pressure on older stock.
- Growth signals — sustained hiring, headcount against floor area, funding rounds.
- Distress signals, read in reverse — overdue accounts, strike-off and winding-up notices (The Gazette).
The join matters as much as the sources: a lease record is only useful once it is matched to the current occupier of the actual building, not an address string. Signal publishes its full source list, with refresh cadence, on the data sources page.
How does scoring work?
Raw events are not a shortlist. A scoring model turns them into one by weighing three things: how strong each signal is, how recent it is, and — most importantly — how many independent signals point the same way. A lease expiry alone might just mean renewal. A lease expiry plus a hiring surge plus density pressure is a company that has already started deciding.
Signal expresses this as a 0–100 score per company, re-computed weekly: 60+ means the company is in market for an office decision; 80+ means it is imminent. Every score shows the dated evidence behind it — the register entries — so a BD team can judge the lead before making contact.
How is it different from property intelligence?
Property platforms such as CoStar are built around the building and the deal: stock, availability, comparables, transactions. Their unit of record is the asset. Office-change intelligence inverts this — its unit of record is the occupier, and the question it answers is not “what space exists?” but “which companies are about to need space, or spend on the space they have?”.
The two are complements, not substitutes. An agent might use a property database to understand the market and office-change intelligence to know which occupiers to pitch this quarter.
How is it different from contact data?
Contact databases (Cognism, Apollo, ZoomInfo and similar) answer “who is this company and how do I reach the right person?” — for every company, all the time. They are a reach layer. Office-change intelligence is a timing layer: it tells you which companies are worth reaching now, and why. Many teams run both — the intelligence decides who this quarter’s calls are; the contact database deepens the org chart once a pursuit is live.
How is it different from tender alerts?
Tender portals and construction-project databases (Glenigan, Barbour ABI) surface opportunities once a formal process exists — a planning reference, a contract notice, a shortlist. That is precisely the moment competition becomes visible to everyone. Office-change intelligence works upstream of that moment: it reads the occupier-side events that precede a project, often before anyone has drawn anything. Most London Cat B fit-outs never need planning consent at all, so a planning-led feed structurally misses them.
Who uses office-change intelligence?
Any business that wins work when a company changes its office: fit-out contractors and D&B firms, workplace designers and consultancies, commercial agents chasing occupier-rep mandates, furniture dealers, AV and IT integrators, office relocation firms, facilities-management providers, and project and cost consultants. Landlords and flexible-workspace operators use it from the other side — to see which occupiers may be arriving or leaving.
What does the lifecycle of a scored opportunity look like?
A typical arc: a company’s lease expiry enters the 24-month horizon, which puts it on the radar at a low score. Months later, sustained office-based hiring lifts the score; headcount pressed against the recorded floor area lifts it again and the company crosses 60 — in market. A BD team makes early contact while the occupier is still framing its options. Later, a planning application or an agent-reported requirement confirms the direction, the score crosses 80, and the window narrows toward appointments and tender. The value was in the first contact, months before the tender existed.
What are the limitations?
A signal is evidence, not a guarantee. Companies renew quietly; deals are negotiated in private long before anything is registered; short leases and flex agreements often never reach a public register at all. Good office-change intelligence is honest about this — it deals in probability and timing windows, shows its evidence, and treats disqualifying signals (a company in financial distress is not fitting out an office) as seriously as positive ones. Confidence is earned by corroboration, never by a single event.