In addition to corporate real estate groups being under a tremendous amount of pressure to coordinate across a wide variety of business areas, they must also deal with change at a rapid clip. There is no doubt that the last 5 years have caused a large amount of economic turmoil that has impacted business operations. But the rate of change in technology, employee productivity theory and demographics at city levels also put pressure on CRE organizations.
In order to help companies, the CRE organization of the future must be able to proactively handle organizational change and forecast which market changes will impact businesses.
Change is the order of the day. And the more areas that CRE is responsible for covering, the more change they must deal with.
3 years from now, CRE Service Providers will not be able to be simple order takers (“please go find me 25,000 square feet of Class B space at $14.00 a foot for a back office group”). There will not be any simple CRE requests because there are an increasing number of variables that need to be taken into account.
But this change also means that CRE Service Providers must be able to help organizations understand the impact of a change whether it be a Merger/Acquisition, Business Spin-off, Consolidation, Restructure, etc. This has typically been the realm of the management consulting firms but they often don’t have the hand-on expertise to understand how the business strategy impacts real estate plans and operations. (I’ll now repeat yesterday’s assertion that in the next 3 years there will be a CRE Service Provider that is talked of in the same way that Deloitte or Ernst & Young is.)
A focus on proactive analysis and planning will be the hallmark of successful CRE organizations 3 years from now.