Do you already have a large commercial real estate lease portfolio, or is your organisation expanding to multiple sites? Have you considered your options for managing your growing portfolio? Hire an internal property team? Centralise your lease management using the right software package?
In this article, we take a look at the who, what, where, why and how of a strategic planning process that ensures a successful lease portfolio.
Who: Employees and business stakeholders
Like most scenarios in life, your planning needs to take special consideration around those people who are affected by your decisions. When it comes to commercial property and accommodation decisions, the people affected are your employees.
Your employees support the successful functioning of your organisation with their daily lives. Shifts in accommodation can affect their daily travel time, increasing or decreasing annoyances. Accommodation shifts will communicate to them that they are either being valued or not considered at all and the cost of disengagement is high. While a cut-throat environment and a culture of fear can ensure engagement for some time, research shows that this type of environment will likely lead to disengagement over the long term. Engagement in work is associated with feeling valued, secure, supported, and respected. How can accommodation decisions support your employees?
Secondly, the stakeholders also have a lot at “stake”. In a perfect world, employees could have abundant luxuries, but of course, balancing investment into an environment that encourages productivity with the actual profits it creates is a complex paradox.
What: Common goals and agreement
Asking the difficult questions, challenging the preconceptions and offering ideas all help to shine a light on the options and create a platform for making positive change through your accommodation choices. A great tenant representative will always focus on establishing agreement internally before moving forward to external negotiations.
Where: The Commercial Real Estate Market
A changing industry. The commercial real estate market is often changing in it’s nuances. Making it hard to produce the same consistent outcome when it comes to deal making. Knowing where the market is, where to look for and how to create leverage will prove to get you the best possible deal at the time.
Why: To establish fundamental decisions
Life isn’t perfect and deals often aren’t either. By ensuring clear communication around decisions made you avoid the internal tensions that often occur during times of change.
How: Take actions that shape and guide the organisation
Times of change are served by a clear governing structure, maintaining communication across all layers of a business, knowing what information serves which people and having clear time frames in which communications are given. In this way the decisions made are built into the business so that no function or person of the business is left behind.
We have been helping companies strategically plan their commercial real estate lease portfolios for over 23 years. We build our business around maintaining a consistently high value ability to offer sound advice, judgement and representation to tenant organisations. Whether in relation to a one-off transaction or a strategic portfolio review LPC is positioned in a unique place, being able to provide impartial and expert consultancy through to delivery. We are guided by the principal “Do-The-Right-Thing” and are truly excited every time we solve a client’s real estate problem and believe that every successful project can trace its routes back to the preparations made at the start.
