If you are in corporate real estate, the odds are good that this is one of the top 5 questions you have been asked over the last year. In the US, everyone knows that office occupancy is very low on Mondays and Fridays. [Note: it was probably low on Mondays and Fridays before the pandemic…
Tag: CRE
Some thoughts on why Industrial Engineering and Corporate Real Estate are such a good match.
I have a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. The only reason I knew what I would be doing after graduation was that I had completed two fantastic internships with UPS Supply Chain Solutions and they were offering me a job. It just happened that the role was in their facilities engineering team that built…
Offices versus Homes: Should the office be competing with homes in an attempt to draw employees back?
It has become standard fair in real estate circles to talk about how the office is in competition with people’s homes. The thinking goes that if employees can either work from home or the office, then the office must be made more enticing to draw people toward that option. Unstated in this theory is the…
The future is going to show up for us no matter what we do or say. We may be able to influence it, but we definitely are not stopping it.
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….
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…
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…
Too much real estate data is not always a good thing. Data is dangerous when misunderstood.
As an Industrial Engineer, I love data and all the things I can do with a good, high-quality data set. As a Real Estate professional, I am completely used to working in a world with limited, fragmented data. These two worlds actually come together surprisingly well historically because understanding what to look for in a…
6 big predictions on where Corporate Real Estate is heading over the next three years.
There is a general sense that the world of Real Estate (both Corporate and Commercial) is due for massive change. The pandemic has shown that the way work was done before can dramatically change leading to more work-from-home days and smaller corporate workplace requirements. This then could have a knock-on effect on commercial real estate…
Change, change, change. Workplace occupancy has returned but only when measuring across new time windows.
Are we officially post-pandemic yet? No? One thing we are past is everything we used to know and understand about corporate real estate and how people use the space their companies provide to them. If headlines are any indication, workers are not returning to offices as expected. Companies require a return (Apple x2, Goldman, Tesla)…
There’s a gulf between “balanced” and “best”
I keep harping on the theme that real estate is hard. Today’s thought on the topic is about all the times that I’ve heard people say that the goal is to build the best workplace possible when it comes to design. I’ve heard it from PMs, Architects, Interior Designers, Brokers, Consultants, you name it. Everyone…