1. Corporate real estate management (CREM) concerns the management of buildings and parcels of land at the disposal of private and public organizations that are not primarily in the real estate business. An organization that occupies space is in the real estate business and needs to manage it properly. CREM covers the entire range of activities concerning portfolios of buildings and land holdings: investment planning and management, financial planning and management, construction planning and management, and facilities planning and management. The chief real estate officer (CREO) is the top executive concerned with an organization’s property and needs to integrate all these activities into a coherent strategy.

2. Just as a fleet of ships requires overall strategy and co-ordination among individual vessels, so too does a “fleet” of buildings. Although each vessel in a fleet may have a separate mission, the fleet as a whole is informed by a mission common to all. This mission stems from the strategic objectives of an organization. The primary concern of CREM is to establish and maintain a close match between an organization’s business and property strategies.

3. The possible courses of action differ for buildings and parcels of land in different parts of an organization’s portfolio. Conversely, the very structure of the portfolio should reflect alternative courses of action that apply to different classes of real property. One of the most important functions of CREM is to keep an account of the options available for various components of the portfolio. This information can be used as the basis for detailed contingency planning for properties that are the best candidates for disposition or significant reconstruction.

4. Each property is going through the real property cycle, starting from and returning to “unimproved land”. In some cases the real property cycle involves shortcuts and detours of various kinds. The stage in the cycle in which a particular property may be found needs to be understood in the light of other cycles which are important to an organization, such as product and/or process cycles. CREM is concerned with the entire real property cycle of each property in the portfolio, although it focuses on the utilization and operation stage. More precisely, it is concerned with the relationship between the real property cycle and other strategic cycles characterizing the organization in question.

5. The opportunities to influence the costs and benefits of building ownership decline most rapidly in the planning and design phases of the building process. CREM tools need to be applied as early in the real property cycle as possible. The information available to an organization concerning its “good” and “bad” buildings is invaluable in guiding both new construction projects and repair and reconstruction projects. As the real property portfolio of each organization differs considerably from any other portfolio, each organization needs to develop and maintain a database with information specific to that organization.

6. The primary operational task of CREM is to provide approaches and tools that facilitate the formation and maintenance of a feedback loop between real property performance across the portfolio and managerial action. The feedback loop opens the road towards continuous incremental improvement of real property performance, guided by the ever-changing objectives of an organization. Continuous incremental improvement that is always in line with changing organizational goals is the “theory” behind CREM. It focuses on the provision of tools that would help change an organization’s real property portfolio in the right direction, while relying on the business strategy for determining what direction is right for the organization. The information concerning property performance available to an organization should be arrayed so as to ensure that its management can learn about the consequences of their actions on real property performance, as well as the effect of real property on the overall performance of the organization.

7. CREM requires effective monitoring of property performance by means of a system of property performance indicators. For a given budget, there is a tradeoff between many indicators measured a few times, and a few indicators measured many times. The latter is generally preferable to the former, because management is generally more interested in relative change than in absolute values of performance indicators.

8. As in manufacturing, the objective of statistical quality control (SQC) is to ensure that actual property performance is within the desired bounds—upper and/or lower. These bounds can be tightened over time. In the case of properties, SQC should be applied with special care. First, cross-sectional comparisons of buildings are difficult because of their heterogeneity; even identical buildings at different locations will appear to be different. Second, longitudinal comparisons of the same building at different points in time are difficult because many building processes are very slow; everything will appear to be the same even over long periods of time.

9. Because one of the key concerns of CREM is the maintenance of a continual ability to adapt to changing economic conditions facing an organization, the structure of real property performance indicators should correspond to the structure of the portfolio itself. The management of adaptability and flexibility should not be narrowly directed only towards individual buildings. The problem arises on at least two additional levels—that of a cluster of buildings, and that of the portfolio as a whole. Furthermore, on all three levels there are distinct aspects of the problem: physical, financial, and organizational. Physical aspects predominate on the level of individual buildings; financial aspects predominate at the portfolio level; and organizational aspects are especially important at the building-cluster level. Again, all these aspects of CREM need to be integrated by the CREO into a coherent property strategy.

10. Real property performance should be measured with the objective of gradually changing the character of the entire portfolio via continual managerial action bent on improving real property performance. The key objective is to improve the overall performance of the portfolio by shifting the average performance in the direction of improvement, as well as to tighten the variation around that average performance. “Good” and “bad” performance are relative notions. The best performance in one period may be considered to be the worst in another. Moreover, at any one time there will necessarily exist both “good” and “bad” buildings.

From Ranko Bon’s “Ten Principles of Corporate Real Estate Management,” Facilities, Vol. 12, No. 5, 1994, pp. 9-10.