Let me start by saying this is not a post intended to shout down mandates or say they are wrong. What I want to address is the unintended consequences that have come up in most mandates throughout 2023 and the impact those consequences have on future real estate decisions. There is tension between real estate…
Tag: strategy
I am starting to think that the term “Hub and Spoke” cannot apply to office workplace strategies.
The hub and spoke concept is coming like a freight train to corporate real estate. It works as a rough picture of how workplace portfolios might evolve, but operationally I cannot imagine how it would actually work. For those not familiar with it, the hub and spoke concept has been one of the dominant approaches…
2023 will be known as the year when businesses began to understand how workplaces are actually used
Since the dawn of corporate real estate, businesses have seen it as a necessary function but not one they wanted to think about the strategy of. In most companies, the closest most leaders came to thinking about their real estate strategy was when the office they sat in was up for a project and they…
What is Flexible office leasing in the work-from-home and hybrid era?
I have spent most of my time in 2023 thinking about flexible real estate. It is a topic that seems both urgent yet also surprisingly undeveloped. It is both the future and still very much non-existent in most markets. But the questions swirling through my head are many. Let us start by clarifying, this is…
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…
Improving Employee Experience goes hand-in-hand with reducing real estate costs. 5 areas to reduce costs while improving the experience.
There is a stereotype that improving employee experience within a workplace requires increasing costs. Companies often attempt this approach in practice but it rarely actually works for a few obvious reasons when you step back and think about it. Cost and experience are related but it follows a curve. The more you spend, the more…
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…
Flex in Corporate Real Estate is taking on a whole new meaning.
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…
“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…
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…