When someone says “flex” to a person in CRE, it usually is shorthand for coworking. It means space that is on a short-term agreement that may or may not be shared with others. In most cases, the focus is on smaller use cases meaning the need for a handful of people up to maybe 10k…
Author: dmusic604
Requiring people in the office seems to be the “Idea of Year 2023” based on headlines.
My first post of the year was about the fallacy behind “needing people in the office.” Unexpectedly to me, the idea that employees must be in the office a set number of days every week has grown momentum. I have been forced to step back and look at this idea from a fresh angle just…
“Needing people in the office” is a fallacy of logic that leads to bad real estate decisions.
Let’s just start off by acknowledging that most real estate hot takes this year start by trying to pretend the world is not still in the middle of a pandemic. The reality is that most of the world (but parts are still in pandemic restrictions even today) relaxed or eliminated their COVID-19 restrictions between June…
I hope everyone has a Happy Holidays and a Great New Year! I for one will be very happy to have 2022 behind me.
We have finally reached that time of the year when we all share our thoughts for the year past and our hopes for the year ahead. It’s a wonderful period meant for global introspection and resetting our mindset for what comes next. Not everyone takes it that way, but most give it a shot. 2022…
Productivity targets should never drive your workplace standards.
Productivity is the seeming Holy Grail of real estate/workplace consulting. A never-ending wave of MBAs come crashing through businesses spouting their ability to design real estate standards and strategies that will improve your company’s productivity. Every ounce of these pitches is snake oil. There has never been a study that can effectively link workplace design…
Future-proofing – by definition – requires effort beyond today and into the future.
As the nature of corporate real estate shifts before our eyes, there is a lot of talk about future-proofing real estate portfolios and workplace designs against on-going change. This makes perfect sense as a concept. Anytime things are in a state of constant change, making yourself resilient against future state impacts is wise. The challenge…
5 not-so-simple steps for building a Real Estate Portfolio Strategy for 2023 (and beyond)
I hear the question “What will real estate portfolios look like in the future?” a lot these days. Words like Hybrid, Flexible, Resilient, Agile, Mobile, Collaborative, and Smaller keep playing on repeat in real estate strategy sessions. However, these are usually just descriptive words in these sessions without much data to back up what they…
Hybrid Workplaces require teams to reimagine their cultural dynamics when not together as often.
While no one agrees on what hybrid working means in practice, it is universally agreed that it means less often in the office than in 2019. A very small percentage of people are back as often as they used to be, some people are now only 1 day a week less in the office, and…
The conundrum of Impossibility. Sometimes just having the wrong mindset leads to the outcome.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are painful to deal with. Knowing that the wrong thing is going to happen and there is nothing you can do to stop it fills most of us with a sense of dread. Who in their right mind wants to know a bad thing is coming and there is nothing to prevent it?…
Thinking a bit about Real Estate and ESG. It comes down to processes and outcomes.
If the big topic of the year in real estate has been hybrid working, a close second has been ESG and all of its subcategories. For those not aware, ESG is Environmental, Social, and Governance. As an area, it provides a lens that companies can use to evaluate their actions that impact the broader world….