In the world of CRE, every decision we make has trade-offs that impact people outside of our realm of control. Tight density standards can impact recruiting but loose standards cost more money (and could also impact recruiting). A modern office built for lots of collaboration requires significant investment in new IT equipment to keep up with bandwidth demand.
Financials are the number one trade-off though. It is ALWAYS possible to reduce the cost of real estate. There is no reason that a 100% work-from-home model could not be adopted which has zero real estate cost. Therefore everything above zero costs more than the minimum.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been asked “Can we reduce that cost?” The answer is always “Yes, But.” Why does an effective real estate department need strongly agreed standards? So that the budget doesn’t get shredded every time management wants to find somewhere to reduce costs. Management needs to agree on a base build requirement and that becomes the cost standard.
Reducing against that standard comes with operational trade-offs. It makes it so that all offices are not equal. Standardization between locations – more trade-offs. But it’s all about the standards.
How strong are your standards?