None of us are capable of holding back the tides of time. One way or another, we are all in a race to the future. As the line goes, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”
For better or worse, Corporate Real Estate is a world that solely focuses on the future. When done well, we look to the past to inform that future. When done poorly, we take wild guesses that turn out to be woefully off base. But all that we do is about trying to pierce the veil that hides facts that we cannot know yet.
So what? Many people would ask why this matters because it is true of every industry, job, and role to some extent. And I would wholeheartedly agree that everyone in the world is future-oriented to some degree. But corporate real estate is unique in the number of uncontrollable variables they must predict that impact their success. Just off the top of my head, future plans are impacted by:
- Business growth/change
- Market rates (almost always up but just by a matter of how quickly)
- Technology requirements (bandwidth, hardware, room needs)
- Furniture changes
- Work-from-home/hybrid preferences
- Day of week/peak occupancy unpredictability
- Amenity changes around the office location
- Meeting room needs
- Brand presence preference in market
Almost none of these are controllable or even influenceable by the corporate real estate team. Yet all of them play a potentially significant role in whether that team is successful 3, 5 or 10 years in the future. It is not an impossible task, but it is damn difficult.
This is not a complaint, though. This is an explanation for why I love this world of corporate real estate. It is fundamentally important to a business’s success yet often criminally overlooked. It is a real challenge with a real ability to have lasting effects.
The future comes for all of us, but the trick is to embrace this inevitability. If you can embrace it, welcoming its changes with an open mind, you can succeed.