When it comes to corporate real estate optimization, it's hard to beat the returns that you can achieve by discarding a property that is no longer suitable for your company's needs. While moving to a different or smaller space might save some money, discarding an unsuitable property can not only save money but also turn an inflexible fixed asset into liquid cash. Here are four ways to tell if you have a location that is ready to be shut down or replaced.

1) Better Suited Properties in Market

Most companies choose locations because they're the best fit for their needs based on their location, their cost of occupancy and the attributes that they offer. While you might not want to sell an office space because a space with a more elaborate fitness center or atrium just got completed down the street, spaces that were perfect five, ten or 20 years ago might not be anymore. If it's your business's goal to always locate in the best areas in a given market, you could periodically need to churn properties as the path of growth of shifts.

Cost-based corporate real estate optimization goals can also come into play here. As markets change and vacancy and rent rates shift, more affordable space may come open. Opportunities may also arise to pick up low-cost space for purchase on the resale market.

2) Upcoming Capital Expenditures

Like most tangible assets, buildings and their systems have limited lives. While repairs and maintenance are a part of owning buildings, major capital expenditures might not always pencil out. If you are looking at the cost of major elevator overhauls, new roofs or significant interior reconfiguration, it might work out to be less expensive to discard the property and move to new space that you own or lease.

3) Low Utilization Levels

Discarding space that you aren't fully using is a cornerstone of corporate real estate optimization. If you can't easily turn unused space that you own into rental space, it could be time to look into selling the space and replacing it with one that is more appropriately sized to your business' needs.

There is more to utilization than looking at the number of desks you have filled, though. While employee density is a core metric for office properties, retail and industrial utilization is also important to track. Warehouses that sit partially empty are good candidates for sale or for being partially turned into rental space. If you're holding onto excess capacity for peak periods, you might be better served by contracting with a public warehouse for demand spikes. When considering retail properties, you can look at sales per square foot as an indication of an unproductive location that needs to be either reduced in size or discarded.

4) Shifting Corporate Strategies

Ultimately, corporate real estate optimization is about aligning your company's property portfolio to its business goals. When your company's strategies shift, good properties become bad ones in need of culling simply because the strategy should lead the portfolio and not vice versa. The best factory in the world is useless to a company that has decided to outsource all of its production, and a data center ceases to be valuable when a company moves the operations it once hosted to a cloud provider. In these instances, holding on to the corporate real estate assets creates a drain on your company's operating cash flow with no attendant benefits.