Data and the CRE Portfolio Opportunity

Over the past three decades, managing occupied real estate has remained largely unchanged. Granted, people reinterpret the purpose of real estate every few years, change the focal point and declare it anew. But, at the core, managing real estate is always about efficiently using corporate assets to achieve business goals. 

Of course, all things change over time – assets (e.g., post-merger portfolio expansion), business goals (e.g., grow vs. reduce costs) and the nature of use (e.g., cellular offices vs. employee experience spaces). Fundamentally, though, the goal of occupancy management remains the same – be efficient, use the right assets and contribute to realizing business objectives.

The challenge has historically been discerning opportunities and risks in the ever-changing market environment. While gathering data, executing analyses and aligning stakeholders is a timely and costly commitment, without doing so, opportunities could be missed, seen late, or not seen at all. Given the longer duration and higher cost of transacting in real estate relative to other assets, it is harder to capture the value of a real estate asset opportunistically. 

What is different and exciting today is the ever-increasing power to aggregate and synthesize data, which can be applied to portfolios to materially increase their agility, allow corporate real estate (CRE) functions to be more opportunistic and significantly enhance their ability to support business goals. At Newmark Global Corporate Services (GCS), we are committed to leveraging data as an automated process for our enterprise accounts. 

NewliticQuest, Newmark GCS’ latest technology product, aggregates and synthesizes data quickly and at low marginal refresh cost, allowing occupiers to manage portfolios proactively. We could be entering a new phase that reshapes the future of how we think about and manage portfolio duration and expense commitments. With significantly lower costs, portfolios can become more dynamic, and space can be managed more real-time. Should be a fun journey!