Key points
- The energy label began as a measuring instrument. Only once there was measurement could policy be built on it.
- For the digital quality of commercial real estate, no such measurement exists.
- As a result, it is impossible to establish how the Dutch stock is doing — let alone whether policy is needed.
- A classification prescribes nothing. It makes visible what is there, so a conversation can rest on facts.
- The first question is therefore not which measure is needed, but whether we know what we are talking about.
A transition without figures
Government has invested heavily in making real estate more sustainable in recent years. Subsidies, fiscal incentives and regulation have made the energy label a fixed factor in the valuation of buildings.
Meanwhile a second change is under way: companies increasingly run on AI applications, cloud platforms, real-time data analysis, IoT and digital workplaces. All those applications place demands on the connectivity and infrastructure of the building they run in. Buildings are no longer only bricks; they have become part of the operation.
The question that follows is simple and difficult at once: how is the Dutch property stock doing digitally? The honest answer is that nobody knows.
What the energy label teaches us
It is tempting to draw the comparison with the energy label at the conclusion: there must be policy. But the more interesting lesson is at the beginning.
Before policy on energy could be made, there had to be measurement. The label came first; the steering followed. Without a uniform, independent measure, every discussion about energy performance would have been a discussion about assumptions — and subsidies and obligations could not have been targeted.
On digital quality we are at that first point. There is no national measurement. There is no definition the parties agree on. There is no way to compare two buildings on this. That makes policy difficult, but it also makes the question of whether policy is needed unanswerable.
What a classification does and does not do
The IT-Label clarifies what a building delivers digitally: bandwidth and fibre, redundancy, internal network infrastructure, smart building integration and scalability.
What it does not do is prescribe which level a building ought to have. A storage facility need not meet the requirements of a trading floor, and a classification suggesting otherwise would be useless. The label gives no verdict; it makes things comparable.
That restraint is precisely what makes it usable as a basis for policy. A measure that already contains a norm is no longer measuring — it is steering.
Making policy about something you do not measure is making policy about a hunch. The first question is not what should happen, but whether we know what we are talking about.
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Request IT-labelWhat transparency alone would achieve
Even without any obligation, something changes as soon as digital quality becomes measurable. Tenants can compare properties on a point that matters to their operation. Landlords can substantiate what they deliver instead of asserting it. Investors can put the digital investment need in the business case rather than outside it.
Those are not modest effects. Much of what goes wrong today between landlord and tenant is not because a building falls short, but because nobody recorded in advance what it would deliver.
Where a government might look
If there is a role for policy, it probably lies first with measurement. Insight into the digital state of the stock is a public interest: it touches economic competitiveness, digital accessibility for smaller businesses, and the question of whether investment in connectivity lands in the right places.
There is also a real need for demarcation. Where the landlord's responsibility ends and the tenant's begins currently differs per contract and is rarely explicit. That is exactly the sort of thing standardisation helps with — and something the IT-Label provides a framework for.
What comes after that is a political judgement, not a technical one. The IT-Label takes no position in it. We provide the measure.
Starting at the beginning
The discussion about digital property quality is currently conducted largely on assumptions, on all sides. Nobody is to blame for that as long as there is nothing to measure.
The IT-Label is an attempt to make that measurement possible: independent, repeatable and without a verdict on what a building ought to be. What the market and politics then do with that information is up to them. Read more about what the IT-Label is.
