Office tenants are asking more from buildings than ever before. Beyond location and floor plates, expectations now include spaces that actively support wellbeing, productivity, and flexibility. For landlords competing to attract and retain high-quality tenants, these shifts are reshaping what “value” looks like in the modern office.

One of the most overlooked drivers of that value is lighting. Research continues to link lighting quality to productivity, fatigue, absenteeism, and overall workplace satisfaction. As employers place greater emphasis on employee experience, lighting has moved from a design afterthought to a meaningful factor in leasing decisions.

This guide explores how thoughtful lighting infrastructure can increase demand for office space, support tenant customization, and improve long-term asset performance. From maximizing natural light to enabling flexible, tenant-controlled systems, it outlines practical strategies landlords can use to future-proof their buildings and strengthen returns.

Erez Asset Management is pushing Veris Residential to launch a formal strategic review process and put itself up for sale, arguing shareholders could see a 40% to 70% premium to the current stock price. The firm, run by former Goldman Sachs banker and Cedar Realty Trust CEO Bruce Schanzer, owns nearly 5% of Veris and sent a letter to the REIT's board in December urging management to act quickly now that three main competitors have announced similar reviews. Schanzer estimates Veris could fetch $22 to $25 per share in a sale after transaction expenses, compared to the roughly $16 trading price on Thursday. Veris has an enterprise value of roughly $3 billion.

Veris owns 22 apartment complexes containing 7,681 units, primarily luxury multifamily properties, along with three parking and retail properties. The REIT, formerly known as Mack-Cali Realty Corp, transformed itself from an office owner to a pure-play multifamily company in 2021. The company has made progress through asset sales, debt reduction, and capital investments, but continues to trade at a sizable discount to its net asset value. Three years ago, Veris said it planned to launch a strategic review process in due course to unlock substantial shareholder value, but has yet to move forward. Erez Asset Management has been active in the REIT space, launching proxy fights at Whitestone REIT and securing board seats at Franklin Street Properties and Lightstone REIT.

The Veris campaign is part of a broader surge in REIT activism. Activists are focused on pushing for strategic ways to increase investor value with an eye toward full-company sales. Elliott Management pressured Rexford Industrial to make leadership changes and improve capital discipline, while Land & Buildings ran sustained campaigns at National Health Investors over two proxy seasons. The combination of elevated interest rates and market volatility has created conditions where activists can point to significant valuation gaps and argue that boards aren't acting boldly enough to realize value for shareholders. Whether the board listens or not depends on how many other investors agree.

OpenAI launched Frontier this week, an enterprise platform for building what it calls "AI co-workers" that can execute complete workflows across business systems instead of just answering questions. The platform acts as an intelligence layer connecting disparate systems and data within organizations, with early adopters including Uber, State Farm, Intuit, and Thermo Fisher Scientific. Each AI agent gets its own identity, permissions, and can improve through performance reviews. Barret Zoph, OpenAI's general manager of business-to-business, described it as "fundamentally transitioning agents into true AI co-workers."

OpenAI says the biggest barrier to enterprise AI adoption isn't the models' intelligence anymore. It's the complexity of deploying agents across real business systems. Frontier includes shared business context that connects data warehouses, CRMs, ticketing tools, and internal apps so agents operate with consistent understanding of how work gets done. The platform works with OpenAI's own agents as well as those from Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic. It includes governance tools and security controls so companies can manage AI workers like they manage human employees. OpenAI is embedding its engineers with enterprise clients to help operationalize the technology and develop best practices.

Frontier could reshape how companies think about office space. If AI agents handle substantial portions of knowledge work, companies may need fewer human employees per unit of output. Many companies will likely redeploy existing staff to higher-value work, the kind that requires judgment and creativity. Either way, the math on office space changes. Offices of the future will need to provide ways for employees to interact with AI agents both digitally and in person. Traditional configurations built around large departments performing routine tasks may give way to spaces focused on human-AI collaboration. We could see offices with less individual workspace for task execution and more collaboration areas where humans provide strategic direction and handle work requiring emotional intelligence.

Propmodo Daily is written and edited by Franco Faraudo with contributions from readers like you and the Propmodo team.

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