REoptimizer^® Blog

To understand your company's real estate portfolio, look between the macro portfolio-wide and micro building-by-building views. Considering the entire portfolio at once lets you communicate with your CFO and other senior management in the terms that they care about - what the real estate costs and how it performs. As you manage the portfolio on a day-to-day basis, you're deeply involved in the details of every building, its lease and its operations. Using CRE segmentation to split your portfolio into groups of similar assets lets you analyze what is happening and make strategic decisions.

For years, American companies have enjoyed special accounting treatment for their operating leases relative to the rest of the world. These rules have led to an explosion of interest in leasing space for its tax and accounting benefits in addition to the real estate benefits that it brings. Changes to the Financial Accounting Standards Board's rules for corporate real estate leases to bring them more in-line with the globally accepted International Accounting Standards Board's rules are going to bring a major shift in how leases are treated. If you're leasing space, this change will impact your company's strategy moving forward.

Negotiating a commercial office lease is a challenging and time-consuming responsibility. When lease terms look familiar, many tenants take a cursory look at the clauses and sentences. In an attempt to maximize total rent, you should expect the landlord to add language or provisions that serves to meet this objective.

Therefore, it's critical for you to take the time to carefully read the lease terms and understand every word before signing the document to ensure you're not jeopardizing your best interest. Here are three lease terms you want to avoid or add remedies to counteract them and protect your investment.

In real estate, it's said that you make your money when you buy. While transactional considerations aren't as important when you're buying a corporate real estate asset as a long term hold, buying at the right time can significantly reduce your acquisition costs. Here are four ways that you can buy at the right time for you and for the market as a whole.

If your company has multiple locations in buildings of different types with different landlords, you're probably dealing with a mishmash of lease formats that are hard to use or compare. Some landlords sprinkle the lease's business terms in the document, while others put them in an addendum or special section at the beginning or end. Some are short and some are long, while others have been in force so long that you need to look at the fifth addendum to understand what the current terms are. Hiring a lease abstraction service to create standardized summaries of all of your leases can help you to organize the mess and better manage your spaces.

Occupying space is rarely as simple as just signing a lease and closing documents, and moving in. The best users of commercial real estate go into their spaces with strategies that are designed to reduce costs while increasing the ability of their spaces to serve their business. Here are five smart strategies that you can apply to your company's real estate portfolio.

For many corporate leaders, there's only one statistic that matters when it comes to corporate real estate - occupancy cost. Since real estate is (short-sightedly) viewed as a cost center, getting that overall cost down as low as possible is usually a major concern. However, corporate real estate professionals know that the factors that go into the overall occupancy cost can be more important than the total number. Ultimately, managing real estate cost isn't about spending less on space. It's about getting impactful spaces that maximize your company's expenditures. Breaking cost into its key constituents gives you the key performance metrics that really matter.