Real Estate portfolios for large organizations could take up a full course in Industrial Engineering classes. It is the classic complex structure that keeps so many of our skills sharp.
Take your typical Fortune 500 manufacturing firm. You have your manufacturing sites in the US, China, Brazil, Mexico and other locations. Then you move to distribution and warehousing facilities. Don’t forget the international customers, e-commerce orders and possible self retail points. Then you needs sales and customer service offices. A few operations centers for the back office processing. Research and Development will be in a few locations – sometimes with manufacturing, sometimes not. Oh yeah, a headquarters to give investors a location that their mental image can lock onto. Then you get to the tier 2 locations – retail ship-tos, 3rd party manufacturers, suppliers, etc. It adds up fast.
Each of those points has a unique location strategy component that then impacts every other facility in the portfolio. No location is independently chosen or operates in a vacuum. Think of that the next time you are faced with understanding a location decision.