By  Sally Jones,

Head of Europe at SwiftConnect.

There’s a quiet problem hiding in plain sight across commercial real estate portfolios.

Its name? Physical access. Getting people into buildings is far harder than it should be.

New properties come online. Tenants expand or contract. People forget their badges. Admins get buried in spreadsheets. Security risks emerge from outdated badge lists and manual approvals.

And through it all, CRE teams are stuck managing a disjointed mix of systems, vendors, and workflows. It’s clunky, expensive, operationally draining, and creates friction for everyone involved.

Physical access has become one of the last major holdouts of digital transformation in real estate. The modern workplace is fluid – people flow in and out of spaces every day – but access systems haven’t kept up. The result is a constant mismatch between how buildings actually operate and how their access infrastructure was designed to function.

No surprise that 61% of security leaders now cite mobile credentials as a top access control trend.

Why Access Still Feels So Outdated

On the surface, many office buildings look and feel modern. Smart lighting, app-based tenant engagement, flexible workspaces. But when it comes to physical access, the experience often drags tenants back a decade. (And in a world where 75% of iPhone users already store at least one card in Apple Wallet, asking tenants to queue for a plastic badge feels increasingly archaic.)

Most access systems were designed for a simpler world: one office, one door, one badge. That’s not how people work anymore. Employees shift between multiple sites. Landlords offer amenity spaces for their tenants to share. Contractors come and go on short-term schedules. Visitors expect to check in and move freely without waiting at a front desk.

Yet access still depends on brittle manual processes and siloed systems. Someone has to request it. Someone else has to key it in. Every time someone joins, leaves, or changes roles, there’s a trail of emails, spreadsheets, and work orders just to get a door to open.

This slows everything down and introduces risk. A single delay or missed update can mean a tenant can’t get into their own office, or worse, a former employee retains access they shouldn’t. And because these processes live in siloed, hardware-bound systems with no connection to real-time identity data, there’s no clear view of who has access to what at any given moment. And no easy secure way to connect all the disparate processes without ripping out what’s already there.

For tenants, the result is friction and frustration. For CRE teams, it’s inefficiency and exposure. And for landlords trying to position their buildings as premium, competitive assets, it’s a weakness that’s increasingly hard to ignore.

What Modern Access Should Look Like

The conversation has moved far beyond simply unlocking doors. In today’s workplace, access is a central part of both the tenant experience and building operations. It needs to evolve accordingly.

Modern access should be:

• Dynamic: entitlements follow people automatically as they change roles, projects, or locations. No one should wait days for an update.
• Unified: one credential should work consistently across the building – from lobby turnstiles to lifts, tenant suites, amenity spaces, lockers, and even secure print stations.
• Flexible: access should adapt as tenants expand, contract, or reconfigure space, without generating endless admin or requiring expensive system changes.
• Invisible: the best access is the kind no one thinks about. The right people get in. The wrong people don’t. And the system itself fades into the background.

Done well, access becomes an enabler. It helps tenants feel the building is working for them, not against them. It reduces the daily workload for property teams. And it provides landlords with the consistency, security, and visibility they need across their portfolios.

The Path Forward

The challenge for CRE leaders is bridging the gap between siloed legacy Physical Access Control Systems (PACS) and modern tenant expectations. What’s needed is a connected access network that unifies identity, credentials, and physical infrastructure into a seamless whole.

That doesn’t mean ripping and replacing what’s already in place. Instead, it calls for open, flexible approaches that evolve with tenant needs and eliminate the reliance on manual, error-prone processes. Done right, this shift delivers premium tenant experiences, stronger compliance, and operational efficiency at scale.

Companies like SwiftConnect are helping to define what this future looks like: effortless, flexible, and future-proof access from street to seat.