Step back a second and really think about the role that your company's real estate portfolio plays in its success:
- Well-located retail stores bring in motivated customers with income to spend,
- Distribution centers quickly turn shipping containers full of imported goods into broken-down shipments to stores or fulfilled orders for end customers,
- Corporate headquarters that broadcast your brand and your success throughout your community while providing a productive place for your key employees to work
Most corporate managers understand the importance of managing their finances, human resources, products and IT. Corporate real estate management is equally important, but often overlooked. Here are five ways that better management can help your business succeed at a higher level:
1. Lower Costs
For many companies, the ability of an effective real estate management team to control costs is benefit enough. Managers can lower costs by comparing existing spaces to the market to ensure that rents and occupancy costs are in-line with what competing landlords charge. At the same time, they can also look at each space's role in the portfolio to identify which ones are worth retaining and which need to be consolidated out.
2. Better Brand Identity
Quality real estate management protects a company's brand in two different ways:
-
By tracking locations and their surrounding markets, the management team can identify which locations are moving in a direction that fails to match the company's brand and relocate those operations. At times, the change occurs because of a broader shift in the market while at other times, it can happen because the manager of a multi-tenant building fails to maintain the space. In either case, your manager can deal with the issue.
-
By ensuring that local staff designs and maintains the location in a manner that reflects corporate policies.
3. Higher Employee Productivity
Having the right space can make your employees work better. This can come from having the right types of onsite amenities, ample glass line for offices to allow sunlight to penetrate or choosing locations that are convenient for commuting employees, as well as those that need to travel to and from the office during the day. A professional real estate management staff knows how to address these concerns.
4. Increased Customer Satisfaction
Having the right space can help make your customers happier. For organizations with retail and office locations that serve the public, managers take ownership of keeping the spaces attractive and well-maintained.
Industrial and warehouse spaces that your company uses to store and create product can also benefit from good management to ensure that they're properly configured for maximum productivity, leading to higher product quality, lower shipping times, and happier customers.
5. Reduced Environmental Footprint
Real estate management teams are also environmental managers. Real estate functions like lighting and heating can represent a large part of the carbon footprint for many companies. Furthermore, by strategically locating sites, your property management team can also minimize the amount of unnecessary driving and travel that your employees and logistics provides, further helping your company improve its environmental bona fides. Finding LEED-certified green space is another responsibility that your real estate team can handle.
While a company might only be as strong as the people that work for it, those people can't achieve their best without a place to do what they do. Investing in real estate management and in equipping your management team with the tools and support it needs to succeed can pay off in both top- and bottom-line impacts on your company's performance.
Other great Commercial Real Estate articles:
