While having a big picture strategy is an important part of maximizing your company's corporate real estate investment, the strategy gets executed in the area of tactical commercial real estate. The nuts and bolts of what is happening with your portfolio make up the building blocks that you need to achieve business goals. Here are some tactics that are crucial to support your strategic initiatives:
Expense Management
While strategic real estate is about why you're spending money, tactical commercial real estate comes into play at the more basic level of carefully tracking what you're spending. Once you have a clear picture of your total real estate expenditures, you can calculate ROI. With software and tools that let you drill down, you can see not only what you're spending but also calculate how each site compares with each other and see which expenses are out of whack in which sites.
Critical Date Management
If your company leases real estate, its entire ability to operate is tied to a string of dates. Managing lease renewal dates, lease rollover dates and option notification dates properly can be the difference between having an office in which to work or very quickly turning your organization into a telecommute-based virtual one.
Workspace Management
While your company's strategic direction determines which departments expand and by how many people, finding a place to put those people falls within the realm of tactical commercial real estate. With proper tactical systems in place, you should be able to tell at a glance which of your locations have empty workstations.
With benchmarking capabilities, you may be able to go even farther. Once you've filled your available workspaces, you can go back and establish a baseline for how many square feet each employee requires. Based on that benchmark, you can identify spaces that have inefficient designs and rework them as necessary to squeeze more people in the same square footage.
Contact Management
Tactical commercial real estate is a people business. While it may seem to be about buildings and spaces, every real estate occupancy has a long list of people behind it. Between landlord contacts, property management, vendors and brokers, you need to have everyone available to you to be in a position to execute on your strategy.
Information Management
While relationships are an important part of tactical commercial real estate, from a 30,000 foot view, it is also about information. Tactical systems give you the information that you need to both analyze what you have and to provide guidance to those responsible for setting strategy. This information includes dates, costs, contacts and utilization data but also includes everything else that goes into your company's real estate portfolio. After all, the more that you have at hand, the more tools that you have available to devise and execute on strategy.
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