Great Estates Toolkit

In Depth.Great Estates Toolkit.

What would your estate look like if every square metre worked harder for students, staff, and carbon reduction? Using real-time campus data, our Great Estates Toolkit allows universities to make better-informed decisions for students, staff and long-term estate planning.

The Great Estates Toolkit (GET) is a strategic planning tool for organisations managing large, complex estates – from universities and healthcare providers to local authorities and science campuses.

At its core, GET helps you optimise your estate: deciding what to retain, repurpose, or remove, while balancing cost, performance, and sustainability over time.

What GET does

GET enables you to test “what if” scenarios and understand long-term impacts before making decisions:

What happens if a building is decommissioned?
What is the impact of low-carbon upgrades?
How will costs and emissions change over 15–20 years?

It provides a flexible, forward-looking approach to estate planning, grounded in data, not assumptions.

A three-part approach...

Why it matters

Organisations today face a common challenge: reduce costs and carbon while adapting to changing space needs.

Take universities as an example. Large estates, evolving teaching models, and decarbonisation targets are driving a shift toward smaller, more efficient portfolios. But change happens gradually, often over decades, and traditional estate strategies quickly become outdated.

GET replaces static plans with a dynamic, living tool that evolves with your organisation.

Understand your estate

A Power BI dashboard brings together fragmented data into a single, clear view. It highlights underused space, inefficiencies, and usage patterns, enabling evidence-based decisions and better stakeholder conversations.

Define your future estate

An interactive space calculator translates demand (e.g. student numbers, utilisation rates) into a clear spatial brief. The result is a right-sized, efficient estate aligned to future needs.

Test scenarios and build a strategy

Model projects and interventions – from consolidation to low-carbon upgrades – and see the impact on:

Capital cost
Carbon emissions
Energy use
Estate size

GET also factors in phasing, inflation, and carbon trends, helping you create a realistic, deliverable roadmap.

From insight to action

GET is designed to be visual, intuitive, and interactive. Users can explore data, test options, and see results instantly, accelerating decision-making.

The outcome

GET moves estate planning from static reporting to active decision-making, helping organisations reduce footprint, cut costs, and improve sustainability, while maintaining high-quality spaces.

Erin Peart, Director of Estates and Facilities, Newcastle University

“Working in close collaboration with BDP, Newcastle University can explore new and more effective ways of planning, prioritising, and managing our estate using BDP’s Great Estates Toolkit. Its structured, data‑driven approach allows us to test scenarios, understand cost‑versus‑carbon implications, and evaluate options with far greater clarity. By bringing together insights that were previously difficult to compare, the toolkit enables more confident, creative, and evidence‑based decision‑making. This collaboration has significantly strengthened our ability to operate an efficient, sustainable, and future‑ready estate that meets the evolving needs of our students, staff, and wider community.”

Erin Peart, Director of Estates and Facilities, Newcastle University