Once, even mid-sized companies had fully staffed corporate real estate departments. Those groups handled all of the intricacies of finding space, managing leases, maintaining owned CRE (commercial real estate) properties, and planning for move outs or turnovers. Today, as a part of the movement towards leaner organizations, more and more companies are giving those duties to other staffers. CFOs, operations teams and even, in some companies, human resources departments are all now working in corporate real estate roles. If you're in this situation, here are four rules that can help give you a leg up.
1. Get Help
Even if you're an expert in the field, CRE isn't easy. Deals are complicated, the language is fussy and data is extremely hard to come by. Luckily, help is easy to find. Experienced corporate real estate brokers specialized in helping companies with their overall portfolio needs. They can perform many of the functions that an internal CRE department would have done for you. Furthermore, most brokers will charge little or nothing for those services, because they know that their relationship with you will lead to opportunities to earn commissions for representing you in transactions.
2. Leverage CRE Automation
If your company doesn't have a corporate real estate department, there's a good chance that it doesn't have a corporate real estate module in its ERP software, either. It's important to fix that problem as quickly as possible. Whether you add CRP functionality to your ERP or you go with a third party package, dedicated software for your portfolio makes all of your day to day tasks easier.
As you work on your company's portfolio, you will quickly find yourself awash in dates and documents. You are also responsible for what is likely your company's second or third largest expense line. The right software package -- like REoptimizer -- helps you manage those dates, keep documents in a single place and gives you benchmarking data to ensure that you are running as efficiently as possible and to let you know where you need to make changes to minimize costs.
3. Make Long-Term Plans
CRE moves extremely slowly. Leases can run for decades when you include options, buildings can take years to build or sell, and seemingly simple negotiations can take months. With this in mind, it's important to always be looking a year or two down the line. Even a simple move to a different part of a neighborhood can easily take two years as you wait for an opportunity to move out, wait for a suitable space to come open, negotiate the deal, configure the space and finally move in. This is one of the reasons that getting help from someone who can help you manage timelines and using software that will give you appropriate reminders is so important.
4. Remember that Everything's Negotiable
While the rule that everything's negotiable applies to much of life, it is even truer than it seems in the CRE world. On its face, commercial real estate may seem to be rigid and tightly defined by complicated legal documents. However, behind every lease is a landlord and a tenant, both of which are business people. Want to get out of your lease before it expires? Call your landlord. She might have someone that wants to expand into your space. Want solar panels on the roof, but you don't have rights to it? Talk to the property manager -- they might want to go green, anyway. Real estate agreements aren't set in stone when both parties are willing to change them, and a broker can help you navigate this.
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