Navneet Mandhani is the founder and CEO of Karma Developers.
From my observations, for decades, developers have been largely measured by what they built. Moving forward, I believe that developers will be increasingly measured by how people live because of what they build.
Picture this: You’re an employee in an in-person role. Your company is a tenant of a floor in a building located in a business park. The building doesn’t have any outdoor seating area for you and your team members, making it tough to get fresh air. Because your assigned office doesn’t have windows, you work under fluorescent lighting instead of natural light. Besides the kitchen and two meeting rooms, there’s no dedicated communal area where you and your colleagues can gather, making it difficult to plan workplace social events. You enjoy your job but not the space you work in—it makes you feel stifled.
This is a hypothetical example of a real estate development that gets the job done by providing four walls for occupants, but, due to poor design, misses the mark in supporting occupants’ well-being. If the developers had designed the building to, say, have picnic tables outside, large windows in every office and communal areas resembling living rooms on every floor, chances are that you’d enjoy your workplace more.
The traditional model of real estate development, in my view, is focused on building four walls and maximizing the number of units, total square footage, speed of development and sales value. But there’s a new question that I believe is shaping the role of real estate developers: “How does a development shape residents’ lives over the years?”
Research has shown that the answer to that question matters for many occupants. For instance, consider real estate firm Greystar’s “2025 Design Survey Report.” According to the publication Multifamily Executive, the firm, which gathered input from over 137,000 of its residents, found that “Large windows and abundant natural light rank second for renters” and that the third “most desired amenity is fresh air ventilation.” On the commercial side, as reported by the Texas Real Estate Research Center, data from the International WELL Building Institute revealed that in New York City, “a 5 to 6 percent rent premium was reported for office spaces with high levels of natural light.”
Real estate should not just be about constructing buildings. It should also be about engineering better ways of living. To engineer better ways of living, real estate developers should embrace wellness-driven community design.
How Real Estate Developers Can Embrace Wellness-Driven Community Design
If you’re a real estate developer, there are five steps you can take to embrace wellness-driven community design.
First, I recommend starting with human outcomes rather than physical assets. Ask yourself, “What kind of lives should the community I’m developing enable in 10 years?” For example, if you’re constructing a commercial office building in a major metropolitan area, consider how the space will shape the daily employee experience, as well as how employees interact with the city, rather than focusing on factors such as the number of floors and meeting rooms.
The next step is to treat wellness as a strategic foundation of your work, not a marketing function. Embed it into every stage of your planning and design process. For instance, as you develop site layouts, brainstorm how to maximize opportunities for community engagement.
Third, I advise you to shift from thinking like a traditional developer to thinking like a systems architect. Approach your work with integration top of mind. Think about how you can merge physical infrastructure with wellness elements to create a unified ecosystem. Buildings, shared spaces, wellness amenities and technology should work together as one ecosystem.
It’s also important to design for continuous evolution—build communities that adapt rather than fade into obsolescence. For example, if you want to incorporate common areas in a commercial office building, you can design them to be multipurpose rather than primarily for one type of activity. So, a team could use a common area for small group work, presentations and networking events.
Finally, redefine success. Instead of defining success by metrics such as the number of units, total square footage, speed of development and sales value, define it by the quality of life, resilience and unlocking of human potential your work enables.
