estate

Look about you. If you are on land, you are in real estate. It is ubiquitous and indispensable. For most businesses, real estate is the largest or second-largest asset on their books, yet since it is so common, it is easy to take it for granted. Since it affects everyone—neighbors, employees, investors, regulators, and customers—real estate management is difficult. I intend to distill real estate principles in this article to help CEOs, board members, and others get over this challenge.

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In addition to being an operational need, commercial real estate is a strategic asset. It seldom piques the curiosity of upper management, though. In many businesses, real estate is still frequently seen as a reactive, second-order staff position that prioritizes particular deals and projects above the more significant strategic issues the company faces. Business units make layout and placement decisions, mostly based on short-term needs and customary knowledge. Customer and employee preferences might not always take precedence over closeness to the business headquarters. The following five maxims, which are intended for the executives who mentor top managers rather than real estate specialists, highlight the essential knowledge that top managers should possess.

1. Take care of the portfolio

A company’s real estate holdings should be worth more to the company than the sum of its separate locations. To ensure this, executives need a high-level view of their real estate situation, which they are unable to get via site-by-site research, which is frequently the responsibility of internal workers and systems. Executives need a “snapshot” of the company’s physical footprint, which includes its locations, building types and land kinds, the usage and condition of important facilities, lease terms and operating costs, and risks to the company’s finances and environment. Executives also need a dynamic and changing perspective on how business strategy is impacting their real estate assets and how that impact may change depending on the course taken. When comparing the snapshot—tables, maps, and photographs—with the “movie,” which consists of intricate scenarios of a company’s known and future demands, the study is likely to reveal certain misalignments. The company may have too much space in some areas and not enough in others, or it may have the wrong kind of space in some areas. The research will also show whose leases are ending when, their future costs, and how their locations and expiration dates may make future operations more challenging or perhaps impossible.

Armed with these insights, a leader may take advantage of portfolio opportunities that a site-by-site analysis might overlook. For example, offices that don’t have to be in the city center can be relocated to nearby, less expensive submarkets. Redundant facilities may be sold, leased, or demolished.

When a business is going through a major transformation, such a merger, acquisition, or sale, the portfolio strategy is very important. The process of rationalizing an organization’s real estate, or aligning space and facilities (supply) to strategic and operational goals (demand), may be just as important as cutting staff. In order to balance supply and demand operationally, financially, and physically, relocations, closures, and disposal are commonly required procedures. After acquiring the company, the multinational communications and advertising giant WPP Group promptly sold J. Walter Thompson’s Tokyo headquarters, keeping a staggering $100 million in profits. Additionally, when divestitures are about to occur, real estate might occasionally be the most valuable and visible asset. For instance, Bear Stearns’ primary asset before its demise was a skyscraper on Wall Street.

Using portfolio analysis, leaders may also discover a property’s long-term costs and utilization. Over the course of a facility’s useful life, which is typically 50 years or more, all operating and maintenance expenses can easily surpass the initial costs invested during construction or refurbishment. Taking a portfolio approach makes it easier to schedule building sales and rentals as well as maintenance costs more effectively. A comprehensive grasp of this life cycle can help leaders anticipate—and perhaps prevent—project-level actions that threaten portfolio-wide benefits. For instance, a business unit may lease additional space to accommodate expansion or a restructuring without recognizing that another unit has available space in a nearby building, or a CEO may make expensive renovations to the company’s headquarters while more junior managers are searching for methods to save expenses.

A warning: Stay away from the shadow portfolio.

As they strive to reduce expenses through outsourcing, businesses should be conscious of their indirect responsibility for the structures housing their outsourced activities. The arrangement and positioning of the facilities have a significant impact on the productivity of the employees, even if they are not part of the company. Additionally, companies risk legal action and activist stakeholder action if worker health and safety laws are not followed. For example, companies who have outsourced a significant portion of their operations, such as Nike and Citigroup, have found that they have massive de facto portfolios that require the same level of management expertise as their physical estate.

2. Incorporate Adaptability

Even if it sometimes necessitates paying more up front, the agile organization ensures that it has the most flexibility with all of its real estate assets. Building modular buildings, leasing instead of purchasing, and distributing labor are examples of financial, physical, and organizational flexibility.

financial.

Companies that prioritize flexibility tend to own less and lease more. For example, in order to keep control and because it believed that ownership would ultimately be less expensive than leasing, Pfizer has always owned the bulk of its buildings. However, when the industry changed, Pfizer found it was very difficult to sell specialized R&D sites since it had to sell buildings instead of investing in costly retrofits. The company plans to consider leasing and flexible-use options when it ultimately needs more space for research and development.

The lease itself offers a way to maximize adaptability. Shorter terms with characteristics like growth and departure clauses, renewal options, and more frequent and early termination dates may make it simpler for a company to adapt to changing circumstances. By scheduling the expiration dates of leases, sublease agreements, and exit clauses at adjacent locations, organizations can also relocate or stop operations. As with equipment purchases, savvy managers negotiate leases by establishing a basic price and presenting a variety of choices, some of which, depending on the degree of flexibility needed, the company is ready to pay more for. For example, they may provide departure rights after one year (instead of the usual five) for a unit that is for sale, or modular choices on expanded space for a start-up that is growing quickly. Corporate real estate managers may make well-informed decisions about how much to invest if they understand how company demands fluctuate. The hidden recurring costs of having too much or too little space, or the wrong sort of space in the wrong place, may be more than the upfront costs in uncertain times.

concrete.

The capacity to divide or sublease space with ease is an example of simple physical flexibility. By subleasing a portion of their space to third parties, businesses may adapt to changing demands and take advantage of less expensive long-term leases in these kinds of facilities.

Whole constructions can be designed to be adaptable. Modular constructions, for instance, may be quickly put together and used for a variety of purposes. Built from the inside out, “shrink-wrapped” facilities may have smaller footprints since they don’t have the extra rooms that come with a one-size-fits-all design. Because of its reduced size, a parcel of land may be used for a variety of reasons. The short lifespan of China’s “disposable factories” allows for flexibility in how money and land are used. Using a disposable structure isn’t always acceptable; factors like worker comfort and environmental consequences are crucial. But these structures only cost a quarter of what a permanent plant would, can be quickly and cheaply dismantled, and take a sixth of the time to erect. They are very simple to maintain and operate.

Businesses can more easily transition from an expensive, complex, or outdated use to a new, more lucrative one by taking future uses into account while developing more permanent facilities. When anticipated usage or operating expenses change, these fungible designs’ simple, universal common areas, standardized space modules, movable walls, and readily accessible HVAC and electrical infrastructure allow for rapid reconfiguration of the area. Adding flexibility early on is significantly less expensive than tearing down obstacles to create place for new arrangements.

institutional.

By being receptive to the notion of providing employees with several workplace layouts, businesses may maintain their real estate flexibility. Working from home is the most evident example of an alternative workplace. Even while “telecommuting” has been around for a while, until recently, it was only used to describe a limited percentage of senior employees and workers who carried out self-directed duties. (See the article “The Alternative Workplace” from HBR’s May–June 1998 issue.) But since many workers now have the option to work from home, several companies are looking for methods to lower their real estate costs while simultaneously increasing employee satisfaction.