Your Guide to Analysing your Corporate Real Estate Portfolio with spaciv
As companies adapt to new ways of working, they’re also rethinking their approach to corporate real estate. Whether they’re embracing remote working or hybrid models, every decision about real estate has significant implications. And with real estate representing a significant portion of corporate spending, it’s vital to find ways to strategically analyse and optimise your portfolio.
How to Analyse your Corporate Real Estate Portfolio
The workplace landscape has changed dramatically. The traditional office, once considered the epicentre of productivity, has lost some of its shine. But don’t count it out just yet. The office remains a vital part of the corporate world. And so corporate real estate is taking the lead in reimagining what the user-centric workplace will look like, and how it can best support the user needs of the future.
Analysing your corporate real estate portfolio to ensure it’s aligned with the needs of your organisation and users is a multifaceted endeavour. Several indicators may signal the necessity to reassess your properties. These include substantial changes in headcount or significant global or regional restructuring efforts of your organisation. However, one particularly significant indicator right now is: underutilisation.
Let’s dive into a step-by-step.
Step 1: Start with a general view of your existing spaces.
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- Location & clusters
- Size & type (e.g. owned, lease, sub-lease, coworking space)
- Headcount & org-model
- Usage (e.g. current use like office, laboratory aso.)
- Costs (sqm and general)
- Individual categorisations (prestigious asset/difficult to sell/special usage)
spaciv can help you standardising this process across all assets with an easy to import digital twin and individual categorisation. Doing so ensures consistency and helps avoid unnecessary hurdles as you progress with identifying your actual needs.
Step 2: Understand your users and refine your data
Workplace expectations are in a constant state of flux, evolving alongside societal shifts and technological advancements. What constituted a typical office environment a decade ago may look drastically different today, and this evolution will continue as new generations enter the workforce and work activities undergo transformation. Therefore, determining what your organisation truly needs depends significantly on understanding user needs and how office spaces are utilised.
Utilisation data from badge-swipes or booking tools can provide valuable insights into when facilities are used, but they often fall short in revealing the specific purposes behind their office usage. There were also popular misconceptions, such as the notion of a widespread transition to collaborative-only environments due to the shift of focused work to remote setups. However, our data shows this is neither universal nor definitive.
So delve into the details of how different user groups within your organisation utilise various spaces and amenities to carry out their tasks in the office
Within spaciv, there are several approaches to collecting or modelling user needs easily:
For a general portfolio analysis, often times manual modelling is the first step. It’s ideal for high-level projects and broad assessments, and involves establishing a database without direct user involvement. However, it’s important to note that insights generated through this method may be influenced by individual biases.
As an alternative you can leverage spaciv’s industry-specific benchmark data. A quick and accurate method of gaining insights. Easy to scale without requiring direct user involvement, making it a rapid and dependable choice for a detailed look at specific assets or even a complete portfolio.
The most detailed approach is spaciv’s crowd-modelling, which provides a direct pathway to user involvement, enabling users to contribute their needs directly. This data can be leveraged to scale even small regional results to larger portfolios, generating a very customised analysis with very little input.
Step 3: From user needs to your ideal space
With your user needs data in hand, you’re now able to accurately calculate and assess your ideal space configuration, whether it’s for a specific user group or the entire organisation.
This baseline, combined with your customisable space modules and space rules, enables you to pinpoint the exact ideal space and configuration for any user base within your organisation, providing a solid foundation for strategic decision-making.
Step 4: Customise scenarios to evaluate your strategy
Tailoring customised scenarios to calculate for headcount growth, shifting utilisation patterns, and evolving user activities within the office is instrumental in forecasting the future landscape of your corporate real estate. By using these variables you can gain valuable insights into future requirements.
Additionally, by integrating event triggers, such as leases reaching their expiration dates and may resulting in a reduced space availability, adds to the scenario planning process.
This proactive approach not only helps in optimising current real estate portfolios but also allows for strategic decision-making to accommodate future needs effectively. By envisioning potential scenarios and their impacts, you can stay agile and adaptive in the ever-evolving corporate real estate landscape.
Step 5: Identify optimisation opportunities
Once you’ve gained a comprehensive understanding of your current corporate real estate landscape and anticipated future user needs, it’s crucial to pinpoint areas ripe for optimisation. This involves an examination of various portfolio aspects, including space utilisation efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and alignment with your organisational objectives.
The spaciv gap analysis can support you in identifying over- and undershoots in your exisiting space enabling you to seek out opportunities like:
• Consolidate assets,
• Right-size spaces,
• Reconfigure underutilised areas,
• Sub-lease parts of your assets,
• Renegotiate leases for more favourable terms,
• Divest from assets that no longer serve strategic purpose or
• Explore alternative workspace solutions
It’s essential to remember that right-sizing doesn’t always translate to downsizing. It’s about achieving the perfect balance to meet your workspace requirements. Sometimes, it means simply reconfiguring the layout to create a more matching environment for user needs, often resulting in increased utilisation.
By systematically identifying optimisation opportunities within your portfolio, you can unlock value, enhance operational efficiency, and align your real estate strategy with the evolving user needs of your organisation.
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