Any given real estate decision is preceded by dozens or hundreds of business decisions. Real estate is the culmination of those decisions and the implementation of the vision. But the decision did not start by imagining a certain building or plot of land. The decision did not start by envisioning a certain office or workstation layout. The business decision is the same regardless of where in that MSA you locate or how you design the site.
It’s like a great painter. All you see in the museum is the finished product. You don’t see the years of painstaking practice, you don’t see the hours and hours of planning, you don’t see the anguish behind the decisions that go into every brushstroke. This is real estate. Real estate is the final execution of an idea. Done right, real estate looks easy and flawless. Done wrong and you have wasted all of the effort that goes in behind the scene.
While an artist accounts for the materials that she has on hand before beginning to work, our artist does not let those materials constrain the initial vision. It may become adapted over time but the right vision should be known regardless of constraints that may come up throughout the process. And just as an artist practices to understand those constraints, we in the real estate world provide inputs to the process to help guide what the decision will look like if it were to go to market today.
Bad real estate execution can destroy a business. As Allan Buchanan wrote last week, Real Estate decisions can be deadly.